Lacking a dock in San Francisco, at the time of the Exposition in 1939, the Goodyear blimp Volunteer moved up from Los Angeles, based on a mast for five months. The only time it sought shelter was when a splinter from the propeller pierced the bag, causing a leak. The ship flew 60 miles down the bay to the Navy base at Sunnyvale, like a boy coming in from play to have a splinter removed from his finger, went back again, didn't even stay over night.
In the winter of 1940-41 the "Reliance" which had been spending its winters in Miami, using a wartime Navy hangar which the city had moved up from Key West, found that building commandeered for defense work. So a mast was set up on the Causeway, and the ship operated with no other home than that for six months, saw no shelter from the time it left Wingfoot Lake in early December till it returned at the end of May.
The Navy had a different problem as it moved into the non-rigid picture in the early 1930's. Its problem was only incidentally to operate away from its base at Lakehurst. Ships were getting larger in size, and masts were needed where they could be moored outdoors, or taken in and out of the hangar. The solution was a smaller replica of the rigid airship's "Iron Horse" except that it moved on large rubber tires, and was towed in and out by tractor, rather than carrying its own power plant.
A portable mast was also developed for the Navy blimps, with a special car to haul it around. This mast could be sent to Parris Island or some point in New England, ahead of time, set up and used as a temporary base for radio calibrating or other missions.
Navy ships basing at Lakehurst have operated for weeks at a time along the coast as far north as Bath, Maine, and as far south as the Carolinas, with a portable mast as headquarters.
Utilization of the mast principle by non-rigid airships not only greatly increased their radius of operation, and cut down landing crews, but increased the number of operating days per month.
Pilots of early airplanes used to go out on the airport, hold up a handkerchief, and if it fluttered, conclude it was too windy to fly. So early airship pilots, with anemometers on the roof of the hangar and at points over the field, judged it too risky to take the ships out if the wind was higher than four or five miles an hour, and then only if it was down-hangar in direction.