The Macon was returning home to Moffett Field with a crew of eighty-three on the evening of February 12, 1935, when she was caught in a terrific rain squall off Point Sur. A freakish gust of wind collapsed her upper tail fin, ripping holes in three of her helium cells. She quickly lost altitude and hit the water tail first. The mist-shrouded wreckage floated just long enough for all but two of the crew to escape. With her nose pointing skyward and a mournful sigh of helium gasping from her open wounds, the Macon slowly slipped beneath the waves. "She soared in her death throes," wrote one local journalist, "and was lost to view in the mist."

The Macon remained lost to view until 1980 when a fisherman off Point Sur found a piece of aluminum girder tangled in his nets. The girder ended up as a curio on the wall of a waterfront restaurant at Moss Landing. Years later a schoolteacher from Livermore happened to stop by the restaurant and recognized the girder immediately. "I had walked among girders like that when I was a child," recalled Marie Wiley Ross, daughter of the Macon's skipper. "There was no question where it came from--my father's ship, the Macon."

By another remarkable coincidence, next door to the restaurant stood the research institute of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Encouraged by aquarium scientists and guided by detailed notes from the fisherman who had found the girder, navy personnel aboard a tiny research submarine discovered the wreckage of the Macon on June 24, 1990. Lying in a crumpled mass on the ocean floor, she guarded still her unborn flock of Sparrowhawks.

The epitaph for the Age of the Dirigibles was supplied by the radio operator of the USS Macon on the fateful night she fell from the sky. As that great silvery bulk dipped toward the sea at twilight, a single word flashed through the storm clouds off Point Sur: "Falling."