Questions pondered at 6500 feet

"Stubby" wrote in message
...

Maybe. It has been a few years since I last saw it. If it's not an
airship landing field, what is the large circular area?


I don't know what it's for, but I'm pretty sure it's not for airships.
Airship mooring facilities were typically just a circular track for the
landing gear around the central mooring mast. There just wasn't any need to
pave the whole circle.

Lakehurst was an airship/blimp base from 1921 to 1961, when the Navy got out
of the blimp business. In 1957 the Naval Air Test Facility moved there to
test catapult and arresting gear. In 1974 the Naval Air Engineering Center
moved there and later consolidated with the NATF. I assume the large circle
is or was part of the stations R&D function. Below is a link to 1997 aerial
photograph showing Lakehurst NAS. The present airfield is clearly visible
in the center of the photograph, the large circle you refer to is just west
of it and other test facilities of some kind are just west of the circle.
The old airfield is about a mile and a half ESE of the new one. It doesn't
stand out too well in the photo, but if you click on the "Topo Map" tab in
the upper right corner you can locate it easily.

http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q15121A7C

I'll also post an older aerial photo in alt.binaries.pictures.aviation that
clearly shows the older portion of the station. The large airship mooring
circles are clearly visible as well as the smaller blimp mooring circles.
There's a blimp visible on one of them and another visible entering or
leaving the large airship hangar at the top of the photo. The photo isn't
dated, but there appears to be a strip with arresting gear at the bottom of
the photo. Since arresting gear work began in 1957 and blimp operations
ceased in 1961 the photo appears to be from the late fifties. The photo is
looking east, it's from M.L. Shettle's book "United States Naval Air
Stations of World War II".