Crooked River Pete, SASS 43485

See the post above yours.

I read the troops didn't like the 37 because you couldn't load one in the chamber if you were in a hurry.

Hard to tell by looking at film, studio could have cut out a few frames. I once watched Jerry on a talk show, when asked how he got so good with a gun he said when he had nervous breakdown he used fast draw and fancy gun handling as therapy.

My first supervisor at Goodyear started there at 16 years old early in the war working on airships. At 18 he joined the Navy. He got convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic, said he was frozen and scared. Navy found out he was familiar with airships, Chief told him to pack his bags he was going stateside. Seems the best way to spot subs is from the air, he spent the rest of the war cruising up and down the cost of Florida looking for German subs. Every thing I've written below is info gathered from The engineers and others who worked with the blimps in Akron. It's been a long time I could be wrong on any point but to the best of my knowledge is correct. That big bag you see is not full of helium, it is full of air and smaller bags which can be filled with helium to get it to "lighter than air" depending on the load carried. These bags have valves that control the flow of helium from the storage tanks. These valves can freeze at altitude and this is the problem for most new blimp makers. Goodyear, ( I think Lockheed Martin now owns the rights) has many years of experience with them. Lockheed has been messing with blimps also, so I doubt they will give competitors any help. I once found a book on how to set up fixtureing for WWI air planes, exact same way we did airship fixtures.

Dirigibles have a solid frame that can collapse in a storm, blimps are like a balloon and will just get tossed around, maybe loose the gondola.

Biggest problem is bad weather, can't avoid it to easily, can't handle it to well.

In a previous life I worked for Goodyear Aerospace. We used to build blimps, never got to ride in one.

They are all there, I can see them in your post