At 1,175 feet long, 325 feet wide, and 211 feet high it is no understatement to say the airdock is massive! There is 364,000 square feet of unobstructed floor space, or an area larger than 8 football fields side-by-side. The Airdock has a volume of 55 million cubic feet.
Goodyear built its first blimp in 1912. In 1928 the company was awarded a contract to build the Navy’s rigid airships Akron and Macon.
“Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation’s Factory and Dock located on the grounds of Akron’s Municipal Airport (Akron Fulton International). This building is 1,196 feet in length, 325 feet in width and 211 feet high, equal to a 22 story building. There are 3,600,000 pounds of steel used in the doors and 5,350 tons of structural steel in the…
Building Airship ZRS-4 Construction of Airship ZRS-4 began on October 31, 1929 at the Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock. wish was a purpose-built hanger for the construction of these massive airships. On November 7 that year, Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the Chief of the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, drove the “golden rivet” in the ship’s first main ring. Erection of the hull sections began…
The Goodyear-Zeppelin Airdock was a purpose-built facility for the construction of large airships. The $2.2 million building is over 200 feet tall and more than 1,000 feet long. Most remarkable, the entire length of the building is free of interior supports like pillars or struts. At the time of its construction in 1929, the air dock was the…
Goodyear entered the fledgling aviation industry when it established its aeronautics department in 1910. The company built its first balloon in 1912 and the next year began building and flying balloons in competition.
The USS Los Angeles was decommissioned in 1932, but was recommissioned for a period after the USS Akron crashed in April 1933. The airship was struck off the Navy list in 1939 and dismantled in its hangar, thus ending the career of the Navy’s longest-serving rigid airship.
Built and previously owned by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, later Goodyear Aerospace, the massive Airdock was constructed in 1929.at a cost of $2.2 million.