Editing Detroit ZMC-2 (section)

==Operations==
The airship was first flown on August 19, 1929, and transferred to [[Naval Air Station Lakehurst]], [[New Jersey]], in October 1929.<ref>Pace, Montgomery, and Zitarosa 2003</ref> The airship was nicknamed "the Tin Blimp". Its first Navy skipper was Red Dugan, who expressed reluctance at operating the airship, believing it unsafe.<ref name="Morrow p. v">Morrow and Fritsche 1967, p. v.</ref> Dugan's concerns were proven wrong, though he later lost his life in the crash of another airship, [[USS Akron|''Akron'']].<ref name="Morrow p. v" />

It was considered very successful as a sub-scale test vehicle, but the company that built it went bankrupt during the [[Great Depression in the United States|Great Depression]], and by the time a successor might have been built, there was little interest in pursuing it. In the year before the Depression, the [[United States Army]] was seeking funding for an airship based on the ZMC-2, that would have been larger than the German ''[[LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin|Graf Zeppelin]]'', and powered by eight engines of {{convert|600|-|800|hp|kW PS|0|lk=on|abbr=on}}. The U.S. Army planned to use it as a tender for air-launched aircraft, similar to plans the U.S. Navy had for future dirigibles. The $4.5 million need for construction was never approved by Congress.<ref>"Metal Covered Airship To Carry Twenty Tons" 1931 <!--source?-->, p. 552.</ref>

The ZMC-2 was operated with a zero internal pressure at speeds up to {{convert|20|mph|km/h}}, sufficient for it to be considered a 'rigid' airship.<ref>Van Treuren 2007, p. 90</ref> With its low [[fineness ratio]] of 2.83, the ZMC-2 was difficult to fly.<ref>Robinson, Douglas H. ''Giants in the Sky: A History of the Rigid Airship'' (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), p. 225.</ref> By 1936, the airship had travelled over {{convert|80000|mi|km}}{{clarify|date=August 2014|sm or nm?}} with little sign of corrosion.<!-- Impossible to locate this reference from these vague details: ref>{{cite book|United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Naval Affairs|year=1936}}</ref --> In its lifetime the ZMC-2 logged 752 flights and 2265 hours of flight time.<ref>Vaeth 2005, p. 69</ref> In its final years its use had dropped significantly. Between December 1938 and April 1941 it only logged five hours of flight time.

Considered by the Navy as too small for anti-submarine patrols, the aging ZMC-2 was decommissioned and scrapped in 1941 after nearly 12 years of service.