> History buffs will gather this week near the New Jersey coast to commemorate a major airship disaster.
> No, not that one.
> Newsreel footage and radio announcer Herbert Morrison's plaintive cry, "Oh, the humanity!" made the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station probably the best-known crash of an airship.
> But just four years earlier, a U.S. Navy airship seemingly jinxed from the start and later celebrated in song crashed only about 40 miles away, claiming more than twice as many lives.
> The USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible, was in its third year of flight when a violent storm sent it plunging tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933.
> "No broadcasters, no photographers, no big balls of fire, so who knew?" said Nick Rakoncza, a member of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. "Everybody thinks that the Hindenburg was the world's greatest (airship) disaster. It was not."
> A ceremony to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the crash, the deadliest airship disaster on record, is being held Thursday at a veterans park where there is a tiny plaque dedicated to the victims. Below it is a small piece of metal from the airship.
> Few in the area seemed to know about the disaster, let alone the memorial plaque; even a Navy officer sent on an underwater mission to explore the wreckage many years later had not heard of the Akron.
The article continues with more details about both the Akron and some other misadventures with US airships. Makes it look like we didn't really do a very good job with this "marvelous new tool."