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Aerostats over the battlefield: How Gray Army Airfield Went Down in army aeroscopic history

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Aerostats over the battlefield: How Gray Army Airfield Went Down in army aeroscopic history

Capt. Kyle Abraham's photograph | a U.S. Army C-6 tethered balloon assigned to a third anti-air balloon squadron for maneuvering through the fortress.

Louis-McCord Joint Base, Washington , U.S. Army Aviation is in a period of change as the force prioritizes modernization to align with its commitment to people-centeredness and readiness. With vertical lift, long-range attack aircraft, and attack reconnaissance aircraft programs all expected to drive new developments in Army aviation over the next decade, it's worth recalling a different experimental aviation concept that has a long history but is often forgotten: aerostats.

The U.S. military has a long, sometimes complex, history of aerostat development that extends into the modern era. For much of the early balloon era, Gray Army Airfield was known as "Lewisburg Airfield," a period from before World War I to mid-World War II.

Operation Army Ballooning inadvertently began in Cincinnati, Ohio, when "Professor" Sadius Lowy tried to fly his experimental balloon to the U.S. capital. He accidentally flew to South Carolina, just a week after South Carolina had captured Fort Sumter, and Loy was quickly arrested by rebel authorities suspecting him of being a federal spy.

After convincing the other side that he was just an unfortunate scientist, he was released. Almost immediately, the federal government in Washington contacted Roy, who was interested in the potential of balloon technology as a reconnaissance tool. After demonstrating the ability to combine a balloon with a telegraph line to provide President Lincoln with real-time aerial reconnaissance, Lowe was appointed chief pilot of the Union Army. Although he managed an organization called the Union Army Balloon Corps, the position was roughly equivalent to the commander of the Army's combat aviation brigade according to pay and agreement.

In 1863, federal reconnaissance balloons were widely used until the Balloon Corps was disbanded due to mismanagement, which overspent the already tightly funded Federal army.

Fast forward to the turn of the twentieth century, and the U.S. Army continued to develop its aviation capabilities by constantly experimenting with balloons and airships until the Wright brothers developed fixed-wing aircraft.

At Joint Lewis-McCord Base, later known as Camp Lewis and later known as Fort Lewis, this manifested itself in several iterations of military balloons flying in the direction of the Pacific Northwest. The earliest known airship to visit Camp Lewis was the USS Shenandoah, a rigid airship affiliated with the U.S. Navy that tested new mooring masts built at army camps. The airship is longer and taller than the Seattle Space Needle and can carry six Lewis machine guns and eight 500-pound bombs. The Shenando made two visits in 1924, each time watched by thousands of people. It was destroyed in a thunderstorm in Ohio in 1925.

Aerostats over the battlefield: How Gray Army Airfield Went Down in army aeroscopic history

Shenando

Over the next two decades, The Lewisburg airport underwent several infrastructure upgrades, such as aerostat hangars and mooring masts, to accommodate military balloons. Over time, ownership of these aerostats oscillated between signal, engineer, and field artillery units, and then fell under the umbrella of the "Air Force," which itself would become the Army Air Corps and, finally, the U.S. Air Force.

On the eve of World War II, despite advances in fixed-wing technology and theory, the U.S. Army was still experimenting with the use of aerostats in warfare. In 1937, the experiment brought the newly merged Third Balloon Company to Lewisburg Airport. At the time, in honor of Capt. Hawthorne Gray, the company had been renamed Gray Airport, a legendary pioneer of record-breaking balloon flights who was killed on a free-air balloon flight on November 4, 1927.

On June 17, 1937, the Third Balloon Company was reassigned to Gray Airport in Washington State, from Moffitt Airport in California, with three majors, a captain, a warrant officer, two sergeant majors, a technical sergeant, and three staff sergeants. Major Clarence Loeb and Major Michael McHugo will take turns commanding the unit during Gray Airfield. Capt. Haynie McCormick will be promoted to major during his service in the unit, but without command. According to the Air Service Newsletter of September 1, 1937, the unit had been flying TC-13 airships before being redistributed to Washington, flying more than 3,800 hours in just four years of service.

Aerostats over the battlefield: How Gray Army Airfield Went Down in army aeroscopic history

TC-13 airship

In Lewisburg, the Third Balloon Company acquired the C-3 airship, which they flew until the C-6 was operational. According to an official historical report by the U.S. Air Force, the C-6, "Like the C-3, it is a tethered balloon for observation. But when it was time to move, the squadron towed it down, removed the basket, loaded a small car with an 85-horsepower engine and two cockpits, and flew it to the next observation post. In this way, the squadron avoided congested roads, trees, overhead wires, and other obstacles typically encountered when pulling inflatable balloons at the ends of the cables.

Published in The Field Artillery Magazine from November to December 1937, the detachable maneuverable cockpit gave it the advantage of self-powering, but could also be tethered when needed, performing the normal function of a tethered balloon, providing a fixed platform at high altitudes to direct artillery fire. ”

The C-6 also filled the interior of the sphere with helium, whereas previously the balloon was filled with cheaper, richer, but more dangerous hydrogen.

Before the United States entered World War II, the U.S. Army began experimenting with balloon squadrons to test coastal defense. On December 4, 1940, the Third Balloon Company was renamed the Third Anti-Air Balloon Squadron and began training exercises using fixed-wing aircraft to simulate attacks on balloons from the air during reconnaissance operations. The following year, the unit will be transferred to Camp Davis, North Carolina, to begin coastal defense training exercises.

The squadron was moved and deactivated shortly after; Regrouped as an air transport squadron, sent to India, served in the second half of the relatively obscure Second World War, the balloons will not return to Gray Airfield. Nor will the troops that came down from them come back: the Army Air Corps became the U.S. Air Force and entered its own base after the war.

The Army's attempts to modernize the balloon program did not ultimately use balloons to drop bombs from the air at enemy countries (Operation Nippon Flying Elephant), as other countries have tried to varying degrees during this period, but they did not completely disappear from the stockpile. The Army's Continuous Threat Detection System, also known to soldiers as PTDS or "Aerostat," is a tethered balloon system equipped with the latest surveillance and threat detection techniques, monitored by ground-based base stations. In a way, this is just an updated version of Professor Roy's Concept of the Union Army Balloon Corps: using balloons combined with the latest communications equipment to observe the vast battlefield of enemy movement.

Aerostats over the battlefield: How Gray Army Airfield Went Down in army aeroscopic history

PTDS

Aerostats over the battlefield: How Gray Army Airfield Went Down in army aeroscopic history

At Gray Army Airfield in 2022, there is still a large number of aerial reconnaissance being carried out using manned and unmanned platforms. The Army Aviation Platform, now home to the 4-6 Air Cavalry Squadron, is equipped with ah-64E Apache helicopters and the RQ-7 Shadow Unmanned Aerial System, which can observe and detect threats from the entire combat space of the 7th Infantry Division from the air.

Gray Army Airfield has a rich and interesting history of Army aviation: from balloons to fixed-wing observation aircraft to the latest version of rotary-wing attack aircraft. The 16th Combat Air Brigade is the largest and most versatile aviation formation in the Indo-Pacific Theater and is expected to continue to write a new chapter in army aviation history at Joint Base Lewis McCord in the coming years.

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