America’s Most Successful Rigid Airship

The US Navy’s most successful rigid airship, the USS Los Angeles (ZR-3), is covered in several of our DVDs, including “The American Zeppelins” and its raw footage DVD found on . This video contains select footage from four Navy Photographic Center source reels in the National Archives. We begin with film covering the construction of the LZ-126 in Germany, move to its delivery flight, and finally its christening as ZR-3, a unit of the American Fleet. This is the only time in history a sitting US President stepped aboard a rigid airship. The original footage was of course silent, but we supplied background music; narration is not necessary as the title cards explain what is seen in the movie.