Obscure DC Landmarks: F9C-2 Sparrowhawk
Third in an occasional series
It’d be absurd by any stretch of the imagination to call the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center out at Dulles international airport an obscure Washington, DC landmark. Over 4.5 million people passed through the cavernous hangars of the Udvar-Hazy Center and the halls of the original Air and Space Museum building on the National Mall in 2019, after all, making it one of the most popular museums in the world even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, it’s easy for certain aircraft and artifacts to get lost in the museum’s nooks and crannies, unseen and unremarked upon by visitors who understandably marvel at iconic main attractions like the space shuttle Discovery, the Concorde supersonic passenger jet, and the SR-71 Blackbird.
The Curtiss F9C-2 Sparrowhawk is just one such oft-overlooked aerial curio on display at Udvar-Hazy, a lone relic from a strange and fanciful chapter in the history of American military aviation. Short and stout in appearance, the Sparrowhawk was intended to serve as a scout for - and from - the U.S. Navy’s small fleet of rigid airships. It's not exactly an elegant airplane; a large radial piston engine dominates the Sparrowhawk’s front end and forces the pilot to look over the top of the biplane’s top wing from an open canopy. The rear fuselage tapers off sharply, lending the Sparrowhawk the appearance of a backwards-facing bullet. But it also makes the plane look and feel unbalanced to the eye, as if its designers finished the job quickly and didn’t have the time to engineer a more graceful or proportional aircraft.
Still, the Sparrowhawk’s awkward design and diminutive stature made it a good fit for the cramped interior hangar bays of the Navy’s dirigibles. A prominent hook mechanism on the little biplane’s upper wing gives sense of just how a Sparrowhawk would launch and recover from its lighter-than-air mothership during flight: after lowering from the innards of the airship on a trapeze bar, the Sparrowhawk would release the bar to take flight. To return back home, the pilot would maneuver the plane and its hook to grab hold of the trapeze mechanism in order to be hauled back into the belly of the silver behemoth.
In contrast to the drab, functional stylings of most modern military aircraft, the Air and Space Museum’s Sparrowhawk has a fairly colorful exterior and glossy finish. A bright red engine cowling and similarly colored band just aft of the cockpit stand out against the light gray (almost an off-white, really) that covers much of the plane itself. It’s hard to see from ground level, but the Sparrowhawk’s top wing is decked out in a bright yellow that’s intersected by two red diagonal stripes that converge on the canopy. Most prominent and eye-catching are the large, round cartoons of two trapeze artists – one bloated and bulky, the other lithe and nimble – against a sky-blue background found on each side of the fuselage, just ahead of the cockpit.
The Sparrowhawk’s career came and went in the blink of an eye, however, as the Navy’s outlandish scheme for flying aircraft carriers came to a tragic end almost immediately after the biplane’s introduction in 1932. Both the Navy’s main airships – the USS Akron and USS Macon – were lost in storms over the Atlantic and Pacific, respectively, each after less than two years of service. When the Akron went down off the coast of New Jersey in 1933, it took with it the Navy’s main airship champion, Admiral William Moffett, along with seventy-two other crewmembers; only three men survived the crash.
The loss of the Macon – whose name is emblazoned on the side of the Air and Space Museum’s Sparrowhawk – two years later ended both the Navy’s dirigible program and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company’s dream of a viable commercial airship industry. (Only two crewmembers died in the Macon crash, a notable contrast with the demise of its sister ship.) Already in the blimp business, Goodyear came to an arrangement in 1923 with famed (and infamous) German dirigible maker Luftschiffbau Zeppelin to build rigid airships in the United States under the corporate name Goodyear-Zeppelin. Military contracts for the Akron and Macon were meant to give the joint venture the proof-of-concept and financial foundation it needed for what both Goodyear and Zeppelin hoped would be a long-range airship transportation business.
There’s a line of thought that argues rigid airships lost out to airplanes due to accidents of fate rather than any inherent technological inferiority. It’s mostly a romantic notion born of affectionate nostalgia for an aerial road not taken, but it’s still very much true that, contra the Civilization video game series and its imitators, technology doesn’t travel down particular predetermined paths or grow naturally like branches on a tree. But it’s still hard to imagine rigid airships somehow winning out over airplanes as the world’s preferred method of air travel, even in the short run. As became apparent even during the First World War, the drawbacks of dirigibles – relatively slow and lumbering speeds, high vulnerability to weather conditions, and the like – couldn’t compensate for their whatever transient advantages they might enjoy over their heavier-than-air competitors in the commercial, civil, or military realms.
In the end, the Navy’s rigid airship program represents a failed example of the sort of military-focused industrial policy that would prove far more successful in other areas later on. Jet airliners, the internet, and the Global Positioning System satellite navigation constellation – all spun out from military needs and funded via defense contracts – have transformed our day-to-day lives and helped make America the world’s leading aerospace power. But as the Navy’s ill-fated dirigibles show, industrial policy will never have a perfect batting average and inevitably leads down at least some blind alleys.
Today, the Air and Space Museum’s Sparrowhawk stands as the last surviving and accessible artifact from this eccentric experiment with flying aircraft carriers. The wrecks of both the Akron and the Macon lay too deep below the ocean surface to be reached by anything other than research submarines and remotely operated vehicles. (Bits and pieces of wreckage from another unlucky Navy dirigible, the USS Shenandoah, can be found in a mobile camping trailer-turned-museum based near the airship’s 1925 crash site in southeast Ohio.) Akron remains intact on the Atlantic Ocean floor off the New Jersey shore and was visited most recently by a Navy research submarine in 2002, while the remains of the Macon and four of its Sparrowhawks – discovered in 1990, visited by research expeditions in 2006 and 2015, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2010 – rest some 1,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.
So if you’re ever out at the Udvar-Hazy Center, definitely take in the awe-inspiring, can’t-miss airplanes and spacecraft on display. But spare a sliver of time to look for the Sparrowhawk in its nook, nestled for the time being under the high wing of the museum’s Constellation airliner. Its story shows us that technological progress doesn’t travel in a straight line and winds up in dead ends more often than we might like to admit. That sort of humility in the face of anticipated future advances will stand us in good stead today, especially amidst a welter of prophesies about thoroughgoing transformations wrought by artificial intelligence and ever more powerful computers – to say nothing of speculative mania surrounding cryptocurrency and the apparently enduring panic about social media-fueled misinformation.
If nothing else, the Sparrowhawk and the U.S. Navy’s quixotic experiment with rigid airships stands as with a useful reminder that much-heralded technological waves of the future aren’t always necessarily so.