The Goodyear fleet wrote a remarkable safety record in the 16 years. Accidents to airship personnel could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and in the case of the public, 400,000 passengers had been carried up to 1942, for a total of 4,000,000 miles without a scratch of anyone’s finger. CHAPTER VIII Results of Fleet Operations [Illustration: Moored airship and flying airship] Goodyear airships made some contribution during the 16 years of fleet operations, to flight and ground handling technique. They also contributed to men’s knowledge about weather. For wherever it is flying, an airship, by the very nature of the craft, is continually registering the effects at that point of certain components of weather. And the ships covered a considerable part of the country fairly thoroughly. The nature and movements of air currents can be studied only incompletely from the ground, for conditions there are merely the result of forces aloft. Only two vehicles leave the ground and use the air as highways. Of these the airship is vastly more responsive to changes in temperatures and barometric pressure than the airplane, because of the lifting gas in its envelope, and somewhat more responsive to changes in wind directions and velocities, because of its greater displacement of air. Goodyear airships have traveled widely, have seen at first-hand the effects of rain and snow, fog and sleet, wind and whirlwind, thunderhead and lightning storm. More important they have been spectators at the unseen battle waged endlessly between cold fronts and warm ones across the great central plains, continued with renewed vindictiveness through mountain ranges and valleys. The information brought by these voyagers has not been without value to the men in the airport control towers, who are studying weather phenomena in the effort to make flying safe. A whole new science of weather interpretation has come in with air transport, and the U. S. Weather Bureau has other duties than advising farmers about planting and harvesting crops. It may be merely coincidence that when a new chief had to be selected for the Weather Bureau a few years ago an airship pilot was selected—Commander F. W. Reichelderfer of the Navy, who had long studied the movement of air masses and their effect on flight. Army and Navy ships put in more actual flying days per month than Goodyear ships, when on coastal patrol, because once out at sea the service ships were out for all day—and an airship, by picking its time, and using its mast, can always get out and get back.