19251776 Club
A thunderstorm tears the Navy airship Shenandoah into three pieces over Ohio
Fourteen aboard die, including the commander who had warned this kind of weather was dangerous and asked that the flight be delayed.
Before dawn on September 3, 1925, the Navy airship USS Shenandoah was crossing Noble County, Ohio, on a promotional tour of Midwest state fairs when it flew into a violent squall line. An updraft carried the 680-foot helium ship past the structural limits of its gas bags, and the hull tore apart in midair. It came down in three separate pieces near Caldwell, Ohio. Fourteen of the forty-three men aboard were killed, including Commander Zachary Lansdowne, while twenty-nine survivors rode the broken sections down to the hillsides below…
