From today through the 21st, the Monterrey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is streaming live video from its remote submersible of the latest expedition into the depths off California. The focus of this year’s mission: to catalogue the wreck of the USS Macon, America’s last great airship, which crashed into the Pacific in 1935.

The wreck holds excitement for a variety of researchers: historians hope to add the site to the National Register of Historic Places, material scientists want to see how aircraft aluminum degrades in the ocean, and Stanford engineers are playing with their new toy, the deep-sea vehicle Tiburon.

One of four airships owned by the US Navy between the World Wars, the USS Macon was the largest of the fleet at 785 feet long – large enough to house five fighter airplanes in its hull – and the last to crash. With the sinking of the Macon, America’s plans for its own squadron of lumbering lighter-than-air ships went down with it.

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This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Environment, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.