of cargo and passengers, and long-range sea patrols. The Roma crashed into high-tension wires and was destroyed by fire near Norfolk, Virginia on 21 February 1922. The Roma tragedy led Congress to decree that all future US airships would use non-flammable helium instead of hydrogen as the lifting gas. During the 1920s and '30s, the US Army Airship Service was responsible for improvements in airship operation construction. These included the use of internal gondola suspension and the only advanced semi-rigid airship manufactured in America, the RS-1, built by Goodyear. The army operated the RS-1 during the late 1920s until the requirement for a new envelope grounded the ship and resulted in it being scrapped in 1930. The Airship Service also supplied airship pilots and logistic support for stratospheric research flights. The majority of the airships operated by the US Army during the 1920s and '30s were of the "TC" Class, designed for coastal patrol duty, because the US Army had long held the primary responsibility for coastal and harbor defense of the US. The airship was seen as capable of searching for hostile ships and tracking those ships until they could be engaged by coastal defenses or Army bombers. One TC class blimp, the C-41, was often used for various public relation experiments in the 1930s, including landing on the Washington D.C. mall to lay a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial and experimented with picking up mail from a moving train. Amongst the most interesting U.S. Army Airship Service experiments was to pursue the ability to operate airplanes from airships. While both the Germans and British had experimented with releasing fighters from rigid airships, it was the US Army that first flew an airplane from the ground and 'hooked' on to a trapeze suspended from an airship. Many tests involving a Sperry Messenger airplane and TC-3, a TC class blimp, were made in the mid-1920s. Eventually, the technology was assumed by the US Navy on the "flying aircraft carriers", USS Akron (ZRS-4) and USS Macon (ZRS-5). The US Army continued to show interest in the acquisition and operation of rigid airships well into the 1930s. The Army Airship Service developed new designs, and operated a number of blimps, primarily from Scott Field and Langley Field through the early 1930s when competition for funding from the rapidly growing Air Corps started its decline. In 1932, the Army contracted for two blimps