Fotos para la historia.-

Developed during World War I, the C-class airships provided the Navy with a lighter-than-air platform with highers speed and greater range than its predecessors. In addition, these airships were the first to carry an airplane aloft and launch it and the first airships to demonstrate the ability to refuel from a ship. Here, one of the ten C-class airships built for the Navy is guided out of a hangar.

View of a C-class airship in flight during 1918-1919. In May 1919, efforts were made to prepare the C-5 for a transatlantic flight that would have launched ahead of the NC flying boats. However, as the airship prepared for the flight in Nova Scotia, a storm hit the area and caused the airship to break from her moorings. In the control car, Lieutenant Charles Gray Little was attempting to secure the ship's log and papers when he fell through the bottom of the control car, which had been broken during its repeated slamming into the ground. Little suffered a broken leg, the C-5 drifting out over the Atlantic to never be seen again. Little recovered and was on board the ill-fated R-38, a British dirigible being prepared for delivery to the United States, when it exploded and crashed into the Humber River in England in August 1921. Killed in the accident, he left behind a widow named Joy, who later remarried and was known as Joy Bright Hancock when she became a leader of the WAVES, the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service.