Armed Forces: Taps for Blimps

At Lakehurst, N.J., last week Captain Marion H. Eppes, commander of the naval air station, received orders to suspend the U.S. Navy's blimp program. By next December, all but two of the Navy blimps still in service—on shore patrol and early-warning defense missions—will be deflated and folded away; within another few months, the last of the Navy's "bloopy bags" will disappear from the skies. And so will end an often disastrous, but sometimes glorious saga of the nation's military history.

In the U.S., that saga goes back to 1793, when a debonair Frenchman...

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