‘His Majesty’s Airship’ Review: Empire of the Sky
The R101 over Westminster. Photo: Alamy By Dominic Green April 27, 2023 6:23 pm ET The British airship R101 was the “Titanic” of the skies, a steel-framed giant nearly 800 feet long. On the evening of Oct. 4, 1930, the R101 set off from Cardington, north of London, en route to an imperial conference in India. Just after two in the morning, it crashed into a wood north of Paris and exploded. The impact detonated the 5.5 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen in the airship’s 15 gasbags. All but eight of its 54 passengers were burned to death, and two of the initial survivors died shortly afterward from their injuries. Britain’s attempt to span the territories of its empire with airships was over. There are still “blimps” (powered, unframed airships) in our skies, and even the occasional high-altitude weather bal
The R101 over Westminster.
Photo: Alamy
By
Dominic Green
The British airship R101 was the “Titanic” of the skies, a steel-framed giant nearly 800 feet long. On the evening of Oct. 4, 1930, the R101 set off from Cardington, north of London, en route to an imperial conference in India. Just after two in the morning, it crashed into a wood north of Paris and exploded. The impact detonated the 5.5 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen in the airship’s 15 gasbags. All but eight of its 54 passengers were burned to death, and two of the initial survivors died shortly afterward from their injuries. Britain’s attempt to span the territories of its empire with airships was over.
There are still “blimps” (powered, unframed airships) in our skies, and even the occasional high-altitude weather balloon, but the brief age of the rigid passenger airship is long gone. “His Majesty’s Airship,” by S.C. Gwynne, is a Promethean tale of unlimited ambitions and technical limitations, airy dreams and explosive endings. Mr. Gwynne, a journalist and historian, sets the R101’s human and mechanical drama against a flammable backdrop: the longer and similarly disastrous arc of the airship as an alternative to the airplane.
The Germans started it. In 1907 the science-fiction novel “Berlin-Baghdad” predicted the use of airships as Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) to bomb enemy cities. A year later Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launched the LZ-4 airship, an experiment that ended in a “hydrogen fireball.” But the German government saw the military possibilities. In 1914 German airships became “the world’s first long-range bombers,” Mr. Gwynne writes.
By 1916 Germany was making “superzeppelins” that could travel 66 mph, the fastest airspeed yet recorded. They exploded, the British discovered, when hit with incendiary bullets. They were also hard to control: More than half of the German fleet of 125 vessels were lost to gunfire, storms, forced landings and fire during World War I. Their death toll, 557 people in 51 raids over England, was lower than that of the single U-boat torpedo that sank the Lusitania. Still, those lumbering monsters collapsed the distance between the front lines and the home front.
The British knew how vulnerable and ineffective the zeppelins were, and they knew that the Germans had introduced a new airplane, the Gotha bomber. Nevertheless, Britain competed in airship manufacture. Airships, Mr. Gwynne writes, were “equal parts engineering and ideology.” Britain’s ships were reverse engineered from crashed German ones. In 1921 the R38 was launched at the new Royal Airship Works at Cardington. It “cracked open like an egg” during a test flight, then drifted downward, “spewing out streams of gasoline and water, while men, fuel tanks, and other matériel fell out,” before exploding.
The R101 was based on the R38. The ideology was now imperial. Like the British Broadcasting Corporation (founded in 1922), airships promised to hold together the empire. The suggestion of a globe-spanning airship service came from the agent-general of the government of Tasmania. In 1924 the secretary of state for air, Christopher Thomson, commissioned two ships. The “capitalist” R100 was a conventional design to be built by the Vickers engineering company. The “socialist” R101, commissioned by government contract, was “experimental,” with power-assisted rudder and elevators, diesel engines, heated passenger cabins and a smoking room.
With safety in mind, the R101’s steel frame was built to be four times stronger than the R38’s. The smoking room was divided from the hydrogen tanks by an asbestos barrier. (Everyone smoked, and non-flammable helium was not yet a viable alternative.) The R101’s outer skin was made of linen soaked in “dope” (waterproof celluloid varnish). Inside, the hydrogen was contained in 15 giant gasbags. Their skins were stitched together from the lightest and most airtight material then available, paper-thin cattle intestines.
The “ship of empire” passed its last 17-hour trial flight without a hitch, but it was a flying bomb. Before its final flight in October 1930, the weather forecaster predicted rain and winds, but Thomson was determined to fly. According to Mr. Gwynne, he made the R101 even heavier by bringing several suitcases and a Kurdish rug meant to remind him of his lover, the Romanian princess Marthe Bibesco. Just before 6 p.m. on the night of Oct. 4, the R101 set off for its first stop, a dinner at the newly built mast in Ismailia, Egypt. The “elect of the British airship establishment” were on board, including Maj. George Herbert Scott, Britain’s “leading airshipman,” a heavy drinker who had been putting it away with the navigator since lunchtime.
At 8 p.m., when the R101 was flying across London, Chief Meteorological Officer Maurice Giblett radioed with a warning of gale-force winds. The R101 pressed on, and not just because of Thomson’s vanity and Scott’s drinking. An airplane could land, but an airship could only tether to a mast or steer into a hangar. The R101 crossed the English coast near Hastings, so low that observers could make out the silhouettes of the passengers and hear a radio playing a foxtrot on the BBC.
At 2 a.m. Paris time, the R101 began bucking up and down. Mr. Gwynne, citing recent computer modeling, believes that the high winds tore the R101’s skin, and that hydrogen had corroded the control cable, which snapped under stress. The ship plunged down at a 20-degree angle and exploded on impact. One late-night drinker was saved by the smoking room’s asbestos lining. Almost everyone else was burned to a crisp in their bunks, or, like Thomson, blown to pieces. Britain’s airship program was over. The age of the airship would end seven years later when Germany’s Hindenburg detonated above Lakehurst, N.J.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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