Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The USS Shenandoah, the first in a line of four United States Navy rigid airships, was actually based upon a crashed World War I era zeppelin: the Zeppelin Company's "L-49". When the U.S. Navy thought about building a zeppelin of their own, they had already had blimps for some time. A good portion of these blimps were stationed at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Also, the only room large enough in which to assemble a zeppelin was Hangar Number One, built in 1921, at Lakehurst. The USS Shenandoah took to the sky for the first time on September 4, 1923. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.