 Chapter 2, Airborne at Last, October 14th to 15th, 1929 Two days later, released from its tight bond to the tower, R101 tugged on its mooring cable as it floated 600 feet above its tower at the Royal Airship Works. In the ship's nose cone, First Officer Atherston pressed his ear close to the voice pipe, waiting for orders from the control car. The voice pipe's sound quality vexed him. Rotten, he called it. He wished the ship used internal telephones instead. When Major Scott's muffled command of slip echoed from the voice pipe, Atherston knotted at his crew and they released the mooring cable. At 11.17 a.m., R101 began its first flight. As the ship rose, the crew waved their hats and cried, Good luck to you boys. Many reporters yelled, Good luck, Scotty, in honor of Major Scott. The airship drifted in the wind for a moment before a midship engine roared to life. Powered by this single engine, the majestic R101 circled at a speed of 30 knots around the works. From the nose cone, Atherston watched R101's shadow flicker on the ground then swell to full size as the departing ship passed over a cloud. The shadow's edges shimmered with miniature rainbows. How different this ride was from one end in an airplane where the scenery zipped by, a blur vignetted in a tiny window, in a slow-moving, low-flying airship, one had time to see the details. The airship expanded its circular path, passing over a forest. Atherston could see treetops and hear the rustling of the trees because R101 produced so little noise, another sharp contrast with an airplane ride. The ship rose to 1,200 feet as it flew over nearby Bedford where schoolchildren waved their handkerchiefs in greeting. A second engine started up and the ship inched its way higher. At a height of 2,000 feet, Atherston heard the metallic click of a valve and his hydrogen vented from the gas bag behind him. R101 had reached its maximum altitude. This maximum, called the pressure height, was set by the size of R101's gas bags and how full they were at ground level. An airship's gas bags expand as the ship rises because the atmospheric pressure drops. At a particular altitude, the pressure height, the thin bags, will burst. To prevent this catastrophe, each gas bag on R101 was fit with a valve that automatically vented hydrogen at 2,000 feet. An airship could fly higher, but at the expense of payload. For every additional 1,000 feet of altitude designed into R101, the airship lost five tons of lift, lift to haul the empire's citizens and goods around the globe. So R101's gas bags were filled at ground level to 90% of their total volume and size to expand to 100% volume at about 3,500 feet. The valves triggered at 2,000 feet to add a safety margin. If turbulent weather forced the ship to rise, the valves had timed event. The ship, now at its pressure height, continued widening its circular path with each circuit. On this first flight, Scott and Irwin were flying the ship to London, then Atherston would pilot the return trip. So for the first hour of flight, he had investigated every inch of R101. From the nose cone, he worked his way to the back of the ship along the bottom walkway, inspecting crew members at their stations to ensure they didn't become secondhand. The crew wore the regulation rubber sole shoes, white sweaters and dark brown overalls, another source of frustration for Atherston. Months earlier, he had requested uniforms to raise crew morale, but the senior staff of the works had turned the suggestion down flat. He also examined the parachutes stowed along the corridor. He was proud of their quick release hangers, which he'd improvised from a piece of metal tubing and some string. He looked above him at the bottom of the giant gas bags and had lined the top of the walkway and watched for a moment their gentle rocking. Between two of the bags, he noticed a small gaunt figure of Michael Rope, the work's engineering genius, who had designed the wire netting that tethered the bags to the ship's framework. Not a soul at the works knew more than Rope, said one of his colleagues about R101 and about the mechanics of handling an airship than anyone else in Britain. He now observed the wire netting in flight for the first time. As Atherston continued his tour, R101's engine expert, Harry Leach, rushed by. Atherston glimpsed only Leach's hallmark round-rimmed glasses, the jovial engineer resembled silent comedian Harold Lloyd. Leach shuttled among R101's five engine cars as he tended to the ship's temperamental engines. The newly developed 650-horsepower engines burnt oil instead of gasoline because of fears that the high tropical temperatures along R101's route to India would ignite the volatile gasoline. The oil, in contrast, combusted only when heated to the temperature of boiling water. These predecessors of today's diesel engines were finicky, so Leach had to nurse them throughout the flights, although this was nothing new to him. He had maintained the airship engines since he joined the airship section of the Royal Naval Air Service in 1916. He had begun by servicing the engines on the small military blimps Atherston employed for sea patrols and graduated to the larger airships used at the end of the First World War. He survived two crashes in these larger ships, although keeping the engines running was a high-pressure job, he sought more demanding assignments. He often asked for leave to work with Malcolm Campbell, a British driver who set land speed records. On and off from 1921 to 1925, Leach was Campbell's mechanic alongside Leo Villa. The two men installed and maintained an aircraft engine in Campbell's car Sunbeam, the most pampered car in the world, declared the Daily Mail, and stood by like faithful valets ready to attend to the car's needs. With pride, Leach listened to the finely-tuned engine as Campbell in 1924 roared at a record 146.16 miles per hour across the Pendine Sands in South Wales. Eilmore declared Campbell than is possible to express to the loyal work of Villa and Leach. On the day of R101's first flight, the shuttling Leach headed to one of the engine cars and left Atherston alone on the walkway, standing still and listening to the ship and feeling its motion. The lack of vibration or creaking of the framework impressed him. He continued to the rear, tucked his hat under his arm, climbed a short ladder and shimmied into the rear observation post at the tail of the ship. The post was a vertical tube, barely larger than Atherston's shoulders. With the wind whipping past him at 40 miles per hour, he rested his arms on the tube and gazed at the horizon, a giant airship hidden from view behind him. He felt as if he were on a small platform in space. He turned around, looked past the 67-foot-tall rudder and over the rear fins and watched the ship's cloth cover. It never budged, no flapping, fluttering, or God forbid ripping, so he declared the cover wonderfully good. He returned to the walkway and headed to the control car. The ship he concluded was immensely strong. He felt security, even confidence in it. Perhaps Atherston thought the knives he had issued crew member by his orders they dangled from each man's waist had been overcautious. In an emergency, they would cut R101's fabric cover, grab the nearest parachute, and jump. As Atherston arrived in the control car, Major Scott ordered a third engine powered up. R101 now cruised at 58 miles per hour. In a half hour, the airship approached the distinctive white clock tower of the glass-covered metropolitan cattle market, a favorite landmark north of London among airship pilots. No one could miss the 30-acre complex of merchants, pubs, and banks. Ten minutes later, R101 arrived over London where Scott ordered the stern engine shut off to slow the airship. He intended to give them, Londoners, one good look. Scott started his journey over the West End. The traffic noise drowned the sound of the airship's engines. If all were quiet on the ground, one could hear a rhythmic clanking from the slow-moving propellers rather than a hum as from a rapidly rotating airplane propeller. Yet word of the airship's arrival spread, and soon the shops of Soho emptied and the rooftops filled with people. Three airplanes carrying reporters buzzed around the airship. Their pilots had to dive, climb, and turn to travel slowly enough to keep pace with the airship, which moved at only 40 miles per hour. Even the Prince of Wales zipped by in his sporty de Havilland gypsy moth. Like a huge silver fish soaring through the sky, R101 glided over Buckingham Palace, flew over Piccadilly Circus, and then over Trafalgar Square and Nelson's column. Addison could even make out the details of the chalink, the Turkish military decoration on Nelson's hat. Scott then steered R101 past the Houses of Parliament and over Gwitter House, where Lord Thompson, the air minister, abandoned the bureaucratic papers piled on his desk, ascended the stairs to the roof, and watched R101 fly above. At six foot five, even taller today, with his Homburg hat and dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, Thompson was as stately as the airship itself. He carried himself with an aristocratic bearing that, noted in Observer, lent a grace and distinction to everything he touched. This aura, he hoped, would be transferred to R101. Thompson staked his political career on an all-red girdle of air transport that reached more than halfway around the earth. Red was the striking colour of empire territories on official maps. His chance to carry out this vision occurred when the left-leaning Labour Party came to power in 1924. When he became air minister in the new government, Thompson extended Labour's election slogan of nationalisation of railways, mines, shipping and electrical power to airship construction and tried to shut down a scheme approved a month before the election by the outgoing Conservative government. They planned to build an airship called R100 by subsidising a private manufacturer. This arrangement violated Labour's principles, yet their coalition partners refused to stop R100. Undeterred, Thompson devised a hybrid scheme. The government would supervise the building of the capitalist R100, but would also build a government ship named R101. To prove their worth, each sibling ship was to fly a demonstration flight, R100 to Canada and R101 to India, the latter the politically more important route. The two ships were planned and built simultaneously, but R101 took to the air first, while R100 waited in a shed at the Houghton Airship Works for its turn at the Royal Airship Works Tower, the only tower in Britain. Thompson promoted these airships, which he called my children in Florida's beaches. I can foresee, he said, when introducing his airship scheme in the House of Lords, the time when noble lords believed this house and the terrors and gliders with light engines winging their way westward along the valley of the Thames, northward to Scotland, and southwards to Hampshire, Berkshire, and Kent. On their way, and this is my main point, they will need to rest perhaps in some great caravanserai in order to take a rest or greet a friend, and that great caravanserai may be one of the giant airships floating serene and safe, high up and far removed from terrestrial dirt and noise. Thompson spoke so often like this that the airplane and aviation magazine Riley called his after-dinner speeches the outstanding success of his work as air minister. This slight comment hinted at Thompson's lack of aeronautical knowledge or training. This deficiency resulted in extravagant claims for R101. He suggested often, for example, that it could fly in any weather, and this weakness also displayed itself in his sense of how fast airships could be built and how little they had to be tested. He shocked Atherston with an accelerated timeline for R101's demonstration flight to India. On the tour of the airship, four months before this first flight, Thompson had told Atherston and his crew, before so very long, I look forward to the day when we shall fly together down the old route of Marco Polo to India. This was typical Thompson grand eloquence. By the time his visit ended, Atherston learned that before so very long meant December 1929, four months from this first flight, the rapid timeline for a never flown, never tested R101 to be ready for a transcontinental journey. From Britain's capital, R101 flew up the Thames, passing over large crowds at embankment and temple garden. At Blackfriars, ships and tugs tuted their horns, and from nearby railway yards, engineers blew the whistles of their locomotives. Then R101 turned north at Manjin House and west once over the Royal Exchange. The ships stopped traffic on King Street and Cheapside then dwarfed the mighty dome of St. Paul's, as it hovered there for a moment, where a blood red ray broke through the grey clouds and reflected off the ship's specular nose. At two in the afternoon, soon after R101 passed over St. Paul's, Scott pointed its nose north toward the Royal Airship Works. He headed to lunch in the ship's dining room, a meal of mutton, potatoes, cabbage, fruit salad, cheese and coffee, and turned over command to Atherston. Atherston had waited eleven years to command a giant airship. When the First World War ended in 1918, Atherston longed to pilot a commercial airship to use the skills he'd honed in flying small military blimps and airships. His dream faded as British efforts to pioneer airships founded. Between 1919 and 1921, Britain spent two million pounds to build six airships for commercial instead of military air service, a large sum in a time when a labourer earned about 230 pounds a year. Three of these airships were destroyed in accidents, and another showed mental fatigue, so it was scrapped, and the final two were too small for commercial use and were also scrapped. By 1921, the British government mothballed the Royal Airship Works and stopped the whole airship production. So, with no airships planned, Atherston immigrated to Australia. For a year he worked in Gypseland for a farmer, then soon after his first child, a son was born, Atherston farmed on his own for two years. Next he moved to Melbourne where his second child, a daughter, was born. He worked as the assistant sales manager of Corporate Durham & Company and sold radios until the firm failed. Unable to find work, he served a month as a radio operator on an expedition to Central Australia. When he returned to Melbourne, he sold telephones, and when he was laid off from that job, he sold bonds to Plant Forest in New Zealand. And then, in 1927, Britain concluded that after all, airships were the way to link the territory of its colossal empire. In anticipation of the rise of British airships, Atherston was hired by the Civil Aviation Branch, Australian Defense Department, as inspector for duties with airship mission. He was to assist this mission of British delegation when they visited Australia in late June. They had already toured Gambia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Cylon, today, Sri Lanka, and South Africa, and were to spend four or five weeks in Australia before heading to New Zealand. In each country, they surveyed sites for mooring towers, documented meteorological conditions, and most importantly, they proselytized for airships, hoping to excite the public and entice governments to finance the construction of towers. To generate interest prior to the mission's arrival in Australia, Atherston lectured at the Constitutional Club of Melbourne. Airships, he told his audience, would connect Melbourne to London in a mere ten days via base in India. The cost would be no more than that of a first-class steamer, only ten pounds. He described how the airships would haul ten tons of mail and house one hundred passengers in luxury, large dining rooms, lounges, smoking rooms, and baths. The new airships, he said, could travel four thousand miles without stopping and sip along at an astonishing 70 miles per hour. In late June, Atherston met the mission in Albany and accompanied them to Perth, Melbourne, Hobart, and Sydney. The members of the mission, led by the aptly-named Peregrine Fellows, promoted airships at every stop. In Sydney, they threw a flying ball for the New South Wales section of the Australian Aero Club, where they sold miniature airships to raise money for the club. At the ball, the members of the airship mission were treated like celebrities. The society pages celebrated the apple-green charmant of Lady D'Shar, a prominent arts patron in Sydney with its cascade of green ostrich feathers, and the beauty of the orchard-pink dress of Mrs. Fellows. At the Royal Society in Victoria, Peregrine Fellows dazzled audiences with lantern slides of the construction of the giant R-100 and R-101, explaining that dangers from fire were practically nonexistent. Claiming the ship's dance floors would be of unsurpassed quality and described riding in an airship, a complete absence of any motion likely to upset the most squeamish traveller. The first airships, he said, were taken to Australia by the end of 1927 or in early 1928. So, by late 1927, as construction of R-100 and R-101 progressed, the British needed skilled pilots like Atterston to fly the new ships. Atterston seized this chance to return to the air with the possibility of commanding his own airship. After nine years away from his homeland and from airships, he happily swapped his view of the Dandenong mountain range near Melbourne for the flat, his Medfordshire plane, home of the Royal Airship Works. Now in the early afternoon, Atterston took command of R-101. He stepped to the centre of the control car and surveyed the horizon through the semi-circular plate glass windows that lined the car. A few feet from these windows, directly in front of Atterston, a coxing grip the ship's wheel that controlled R-101's 67 foot tall rudder. Atterston ignored the magnificent view of London as it passed under the ship. He gazed at the waist-high binnacle compass in front of him. To his right, another coxing operated the ship's elevators, looking over his left shoulder as an altimeter hung from the ceiling. Its dial rotated counter-clockwise for easy reading. Next to the altimeter, arranged for viewing by Atterston at the middle of the cabin, were a speedometer and a set of gauges that reported the pressure in the gas bags. At Atterston's left, three voice pipes dangled from the ceiling. They rocked back and forth with a gentle, minimalist motion. Their lightweight, funnel-shaped ends making a soft metallic clang and rhythm with the ship's slight pitching. Suddenly, the voice pipes rattled loudly. R-101 pitched up and down three degrees. Turbulent air rocked the ship. Three degrees up said Atterston. Neutral. Four degrees down. In response, the height coxing adjusted R-101's elevators, the horizontal fins at the airship's rear to drive the ship up or down. The coxing had to hold the airship under conditions within five degrees of horizontal. An eight-degree tilt would cause glasses to slide across a table while at ten degrees, wine bottles would tip over. Veteran airship commanders joked that the height coxing shouldn't feel in his boots if the ship were tilted and what direction it was about to tilt. The height coxing's job was the hardest as an airship was rarely stable in the air. We think of an airship as a simple thing to fly, picturing it perhaps like a hot-air balloon that, the pilot, we imagine, lets the airship float or hover and then starts an engine to waft the ship through the sky. Yet an airship, although a lighter-than-air craft, requires as much use of dynamic lift as an airplane's wing. An airship relies on its elevators for holding it at the proper altitude. Flying an airship is radically different, both in kind and degree from flying a plane, noted Ralph Ubson, a pioneer in flying balloons and airships for the first to earn balloon and airship pilot certificates in Britain. He won the 1913 International Balloon Race and was the second person to win the Wright Brothers Medal in 1929. The pilot must first compensate, Ubson explained, for the ship being out of static equilibrium and out of trim. A ship at equilibrium will hover its lift balanced by its payload. A ship in trim is balanced from front to back. The static equilibrium is controlled by the gas temperature and the amount of ballast. Rarely is an airship in this state during its journey. As it flies, an airship's buoyancy changes. First, it uses up fuel, thus changing the ship's weight. Second, gas can leak from the bags or the temperature of the gas in the bags can change, even varying across the gas bags, which also alters the amount of lift. A ship fluent light will appear nose-heavy when it moves, and if it compensates for these deviations from equilibrium, the height coxswain uses the elevators to correct the airship's pitch and achieve horizontal flight. In turbulent conditions, the airship will pitch and because it's not in equilibrium will not return to its previous position. This means that a sinking ship continues to sink and a rising ship continues to rise. So, flying in rough weather at low altitude required precision will allow it. As Upson explained, the pilot has to be constantly on the alert to catch the slightest deviation from course or a serious change in gas pressure will develop. While the height coxswain labored to maintain the proper height, the rudder coxswain made scores of small adjustments to the rudder position. If the coxswain did not continually alter the rudder, R101 would tend to circle. If the coxswain corrected the path with large changes of the rudder, the airship would shake or rock. Upson explained that an airship is fundamentally unstable on course. No matter in what direction it is headed, it always wants to go in some other direction. An airship's Ovid shape tends to turn broadside to the direction of motion. A large airship Upson continued deflects much more slowly, so much so that passengers might not notice it, but which because of the huge mass of the airship requires quick and determined action to counteract it. The rudder at the ship's rear diminished this tendency to divert. A large rudder would stabilize the airship, but then it would be like a weather cock. It's no swinging to meet every gust of wind it encountered. Also, such an airship would have a low useful or disposable lift because of its large heavy fins and would be fuel inefficient because of drag. It would also be sluggish and response. Even with the undersized fins of R101, it took 30 or 40 seconds to respond to changes of the rudder's position. So an airship is designed with undersized fins that trade off stability for maneuverability. Atherston preferred a strongly unstable ship as did most airship pilots of R101's era. As R101 moved away from London, Atherston took a turn at the rudder. He was impressed by how little effort was required to steer the ship. Leaving the outskirts of London behind, Atherston increased the ship's speed. He thought of using one of the three speaking tubes on his left to give orders to the engine car. He knew, though, that in flight the roar of the engines made it impossible for the crew to hear, especially if they wore their standard-issue earplugs. Instead, Atherston signaled the rear engine car using the telegraph system mounted on the wall just beyond the speaking tubes. Each of its five dials corresponded to one of the five engines. He positioned its central arrow toward an action, choosing full throttle rather than standby slow or half throttle, and turned a crank. This rang a bell in the rear engine car as the crew, operated by the cheery Yorkshire man, the lantern-jawed Joe Banks and the dower Arthur Bell to look at an identical dial at zero-pointing now to full throttle. From the control car, Atherston could not feel the change. Instead, he watched the speedometer no more than 50 miles per hour on this return trip. In the late afternoon, as the airship approached the Royal Airship Works, Atherston turned control to Irwin and returned to the nose cone to prepare for mooring. The bird and grabby gracefully landed R101. At 4.57pm, after five hours and 40 minutes of flight covering 108 miles, R101 locked itself into the tower's gimbled arm. The crisp snap was broadcast to the nation by the BBC microphone stationed at the top of the tower near the nose of the airship. As the crew connected the ship to the tower with a walkway, cries of well done rose from the ground. Atherston supervised his crew by analyzing the mooring while the pudgy scot departed the airship. He laid it in confident. He headed to the BBC microphones with a near shot of Atherston and announced we had a very satisfactory flight. He added that the ship handled very well and was largely controlled with ease. To create a contrast between the comforts of airships and the tiny quarters and noise of its competitor, the airplane, scott reported the noise of the engines was very slight in the passengers car and it was very comfortable indeed. Never mindful that many thought airships too lumbering to be of much commercial value, he added we did not run at full speed or anything approaching it. Indeed, the airship's resendetra was to connect London to Karachi, India in five days, ten days faster than by sea. The airship's arrival, the plane, linked London to Karachi in sixteen days but with frequent stops to refuel. The journey could be shortened to nine days via a grueling combination of rail, flying boat and airplane. As one India-bound airplane traveler explained, the only discomfort is the noise of the engine. He recommended the use of cotton wool or India rubber plugs in the ears. In addition to refueling stops every two or three hours, plane travelers endured overnight ground stays, the plane's navigational systems restricted flights to daylight. A traveler en route to India might find him or herself in a location like Rubar Wells, a desolate place in the desert. It's only occupants the Bedouin, the Camels, and the Iraqi soldiers who kept at bay desert raiders. And nine days was the best-case scenario to travel by airplane from London to Karachi. Fog or high winds would delay flight significantly. An airship, though, could hopscotch over the obstacles and hazards that made India so remote from Britain. At an altitude of about two thousand feet, it could pass through the fog of London, over France, into Asia Minor and fly over the dreaded Sinai Desert. For hundreds of years this desert impeded empire builders, but now it was easily traversed with an airship. An air so clear that you could see for forty miles passengers could contemplate the sun-baked sands of the Sinai in safety. The airship would continue its journey to India by gliding over the grandest scenery of southern Persia, its jagged precipitous but cool mountains delighting the eye, and tell near Basra the ground's green colour faded in the gold of the desert shown through again as the water supply failed. From there the airship could travel in a straight shot to Karachi, a British oasis in an Asian land offering the hotels Bristol and Carleton, the Imperial Bank, St. Paul's St. Andrews, a polo club and a statue of Queen Empress Victoria. And every inch of that journey would be enjoyed in an airship as comfortable as an ocean liner. Atherston worried that the scheduling for our 101's flight to India might follow Lord Thompson's unrealistic and politically motivated timeline of departing in December a mere three months away. The work senior staff, which included Major Scott, had already tended to rush ahead. Only a month earlier Atherston had considered the date for this first flight unduly optimistic. And indeed the preparation for that simple 108-mile flight with only he thought the bare necessities aboard required a mad Russian panic. This involved only a fraction of the work that must be done to prepare for flying 5,000 plus miles to India. To Atherston an accelerated schedule for this and future flights was grossly unfair to him and Irwin and his crew. He needed time to be sure each crew member understands his duties. Beyond that, Atherston, the ace first World War pilot had to master the controls and understand the aerodynamic behavior so he hoped this flight would highlight the need for careful, thorough preparation and systematic testing of the ship. Yet a day after R101's first flight, Thompson made a surprise announcement in a speech at the 25th annual banquet of that most earthbound organization the Commercial Motor Users Association. Thompson began by extolling the pleasures of riding in an airship. Compared to the airplane he said, the airship is or will be a sober and even conveyance. Travelers will journey tranquilly in airliners to the Earth's remotest parts, visit the archipelagos and southern seas, cruise around the coast of continents, strike inland, surmount lofty mountain ranges and follow rivers as yet half explored from mouth to source. Airship travel, he told his audience, will be high above mosquitoes and miasmas and mud and dust and noise. He ended his speech with a shocking surprise. Shortly after the Parliament opened, he announced, I hope to invite one hundred members of all parties to take a flight in R101 adding with a hint of gallows humor and I trust there will not be one hundred by elections. He even hoped for poor weather that the MPs would fly with a fresh breeze of 40 to 50 miles per hour and show that the ship does not roll much. This flight on an aircraft so far flown only once would transport the largest number of people ever carried on a plane except those on Germany's flying boat the Dornier DOX a plane with a wingspan of 157 feet. It had flown 169 people for 40 minutes but only as a stunt. Passengers crowded together on one side or the other to help the plane turn. Usually it carried only 66 passengers. Atherston railed against this proposed flight declaring it cheap and vulgar and in absolutely unjustifiable risk. Atherston who believed in order and authority hoped Scott would realize that the flight would be illegal. The ship has not finished her trials he told Scott, has not got her certificate of airworthiness and has not got enough lift to cart 12 tons of humans about with any degree of safety. Yet Scott the senior work staff person in charge of scheduling all flights refused to cancel it. Atherston's suggestion was turned down flat just like his request for uniforms. He hoped the aeronautical inspection directorate which must issue the permit to fly would halt the flight. They had time to act because R101 was scheduled for five more test flights before the MP's joyride was due to happen.