Shenandoah Court

At Lakehurst, N. J., in the very hangar where the Shenandoah's great body used to lie at rest, a naval court of inquiry met last week to determine the cause of her destruction, to ascertain why she was rent in two in mid air, while her control car went dashing to the ground to carry to death her Commander, Zachary Lansdowne, and many of his officers and men (TIME, Sept. 14, AERONAUTICS).

A model of the great ship hung suspended by wires over the heads of the inquiry officers, while the survivors filed in, were sworn, told their stories and were examined. The stories were fragmentary and mostly technical, no exact cause of or blame for the disaster being readily deducible from them. It might have been concluded that the ship was wrecked entirely because of the ferocity of the storm, that some of her girders were weak, that some of her safety valves were not working and that one or more of her gas cells burst, or that the temporary failure of two of her engines caused her destruction.

The attention of newspapers was largely centered on the question whether Commander Lansdowne had been ordered to take the flight in spite of his protest. Official correspondence showed that it had been ordered in July, but that Commander Lansdowne had objected that midsummer was a thunderstorm period and had asked that it be postponed until September. Later he recommended that it take place during the second week of September. Instead it was ordered in the first week of the month. To this order he did not object. The purpose of setting the date for the flight, as it was set, was clearly evident from the orders:

To pass over as large a number of state fairs as possible.

The conclusions as to the exact reasons for the destruction of the dirigible were obliged to wait on the final findings of the court.