 Part 4 The Post Mortem Chapter 10 The Causes of R101's Crash A few moments before dawn, a week later, on the morning of October 11, 1930, in a cemetery a half-mile from the Royal Airship Works mooring tower, the fragrant smell of freshly turned earth filled the air. Flares illuminated the edges of a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the ground, the communal grave for R101's dead, as workers removed the last shovelfuls of dirt. As the sun rose, the grave-diggers departed, replaced by other laborers who decorated the grave with thousands of flowers and reeds. A floral aroma now displaced the odor of loam. At four o'clock in the afternoon, Royal Air Force trucks moved the coffins of R101's crew and passengers from the nearby Bedford train station to the grave near the works. They drove through the town in silence, the BBC halted all transmission from ten a.m. to five-fifteen p.m. to under the fallen. Bedford banned all traffic and ordered all stores and shops closed. Five hundred police officers lined the three-mile route from station to grave, behind them thousands of mourners most dressed in black and holding flowers. As a band played a bide with me, Paul Bearers laid the forty-eight coffins and four rows of twelve and covered each one with a union jack. Each coffin was adorned with a small label fabricated from the metal of R101's framework. Fortin of the plates bore names, including those of Captain H. Carmichael Irwin, First Officer Noel Adderston, Michael Rope, the works engineering genius, and Vincent Richmond, the ship's designer. The other thirty-four plates read, To the memory of the unknown airman who died on October 5th. The blazing inferno had charred the bodies beyond recognition. Among the unidentified remains were the ship's steward, Albert Savage, Lord Thompson, and Major George H. Scott, Britain's pioneering airship pilot. Thirty-six of the dead were killed within minutes of R101's impact. The other two, both rigors, were severely burned and died a few days after the crash. The crash happened a few minutes after 2 a.m. near the town of Pouvet, France. By then R101 had traveled two hundred and fifty miles from the work's moring tower. On every inch of that journey, wind slowed the ship's progress and rain pummeled its cover, a more sustained assault than on any airship in the history of aviation. The weather worsened as R101 approached Pouvet. The ship passed near the town because of a navigational error by the tired crew. With no watchkeepers, the ship's officers were exhausted and prone to error from sleep deprivation. The ship's flight plan charted a course ten miles west of Pouvet because the town was well known for its high winds and local turbulence, winds so strong that they once collapsed the coral vaults of the town's thirteenth-century cathedral. In the turbulent air at fifteen hundred feet above Pouvet, R101 rose and fell by two hundred feet as its nose haunted for stable air. In the fierce winds, the ship's cloth cover, battered by seven hours of flight, ripped open along the top of the ship. Rain pierced the now-exposed paper-thin gas-bags. As hydrogen escaped, R101 sank to the ground. The distress ship skidded at perhaps twenty or thirty miles per hour across a field and into a grove of trees. As the ship slid, its nose bounced. The impact was not violent, Leedsch reported a large crunch which he characterized as too mild a noise for a catastrophe, and many on board might have survived except for a string of chance events. The impact crushed the control car and sheared the aluminum pipes of the centralized ballast system, releasing tons of water into the car. The ballast ignited the water-activated navigational flares stored in the corner of the control car, the very white flame observed by Leedsch, which in turn ignited the hydrogen in the gas-bags. The fire shot through the crew and passenger quarters, trapping everyone except those in the rearward engine cars, the fireproof smoking room, and the radio room. The hydrogen-fueled fire dehydrated the bodies of those trapped inside and held their head shrank to the size of a fist. Although R101's cover was subjected to bruising winds and a pelting rain for far longer than any airship, the cover was also weaker than that of other airships. Its fragility was a consequence of Vincent Richmond's unwavering belief that R101's debut would spark demand for a fleet of airships. To prepare for this, he pioneered techniques to speed up production, starting with R101. Richmond believed that the bottlenecks in mass-producing airships occurred when construction steps required laborers to work suspended from the shed ceiling. He minimized this time-consuming overhead work with R101's novel, not-in-build framework, and by waterproofing the ship's five-and-a-half-acre cloth cover with a plastic-like coating before lacing it to the framework. Although the pre-coating saved time, the cover now stiff-cracked when stretched onto the airship's frame, and as Michael Rope noted in his June 1930 report, this decreased the cloth strength so there was no margin of safety for flight in rough atmosphere. Rope's conclusion prompted Richmond to replace the cover and waterproof it on the ship. Although Richmond told a newspaper that replacing the cover was an easy and comparatively inexpensive job, he and his staff at the works battled against time to replace the cover before R101 was scheduled to depart for India in the fall. Until it carried out in time, Richmond ordered any remaining sections of the original cover strengthened with fabric bands, three-inch wide strips spaced three feet apart and fastened with a rubber-based glue. These patches were inspected in late September by Frederick McWade, the inspector assigned to the Royal Airship Works. On his last inspection, before the newly lengthened R101 left the shed for its test flight, McWade examined the cloth cover aft of the nose and near the fins. He saw areas where the rubber glue was smeared over the original cover but no patches were applied. He knelt and touched the cloth. His fingers passed through the cover. On these sections where the cover had rotted, Richmond ordered reinforcing strips glued on. McWade reinspected the craft and concluded that the work of placing these reinforcing strips in position on all suspected weak positions was completed to the satisfaction of the RAW, the Royal Airship Works inspection section, and also the AID, the Aeronautical Inspection Directorate. When the ship left the shed for its only test flight before departure for India, these patched sections of the remaining cover were still weak. Key members on R101's partnership, R100 noticed problems with R101's cover. A day or so before R101's test flight, Neville, Norway, an engineer helping design R100 visited the works. Although R100 was built at Hauden, 140 miles north of the Royal Airship Works, its point of departure for its trip to Canada was the works mooring tower, and upon its return the ship had been housed in shed No. 2. R100's captain, Ralph Booth, R101's counterpart, wanted to show the ship's engineer something strange. Booth handed Norway a few square yards of R101's cover and asked him, what do you think of this? Norway flipped the silvery fabric over and ran his fingers along the two-inch wide patch covered by the rubber-based glue. As he flexed the cloth, it crumbled. Good God, where's this from? said Norway. Booth explained that it was from R101. Norway hoped all this stuff had been removed from the ship. They say they have, said Booth. Yet as the ship left the shed for its test flight before India, the works had replaced almost 90 percent of the original cover with cloth waterproofed in place, and the 33,000 square feet of the original cover, an area the size of half a football field, remained. The deficiencies of these sections might have shown up in a long test flight before R101 departed for India, but the ship's only test flight before India was the one cut short by engine failure. Irwin told Booth a day or so before the refitted airship left the shed that he hoped to fly 36 or 48 hours at a reasonable cruising speed in bad weather in order to thoroughly test out the ship. After 16 hours, an engine failed and R101, its cloth untested at high speed, returned to the mooring tower. The proper action would have been to schedule a second test flight and delay the departure for India, but instead, 58 hours after its return, the ship departed for India. A delay might also have resolved the mystery of why the ship flew heavy on its test flights to the RAF display in July, causing it to suddenly dive. Irwin thought the behavior was caused by the automatic valves releasing gas from the bags. When he investigated, he discovered holes in the gas bags. These holes, of course, evoke an image of the catastrophic collapse of a bag and the crash of an airship. Indeed, a gas bag could rapidly deflate from a giant rip of one of the fifteen gas bags and R101 collapsed. The crew would feel the ship's tail drop, and then the ship itself fall by 500 feet. The elevator coxswain would force the helm down hard to check the angle of inclination, and the captain would rev the engines and discharge ballast half to bring the ship to an even keel. Although holes conjure such a vision, the reality of holes in airship gas bags was much more mundane. Only the hydrogen below a hole in a gas bag escapes, because hydrogen is lighter than air, and above will remain in the bag. So to cause a sudden deflation, the hole must be at the top of the bag, and it must be large. More often, small holes in the gas bags caused a slow leakage of gas and required the tower crew to refill the ship's bags more often. To the ship's crew, the holes were more often a nuisance to find a hole in the vast surface of a gas bag could take a week. We can never be sure that the behavior seen in the July flights played a role in the ship's demise, but that the source of this behavior was never resolved surely highlights the degree to which the ship was untested before its flight to India. Not only then was this untested flagship airship the hope of the empire flying patched up, but the chain of command for the entire enterprise was at best unclear, at worst frayed, and ultimately deadly. The air ministry was fuzzy about whether Erwin or Scott was in charge of the test flights and final flight. Even a day before the doomed flight, Erwin was unclear on his and Scott's roles. He asked Sir John Higgins, a senior air ministry official, to clarify their responsibilities. I thought, said Higgins to Erwin, that the roles were quite clear. He then elaborated with a detailed yet hazy and imprecise description. Scott, as assistant director flying, Higgins told Erwin, would discuss with the captain or the navigator and the meteorological officer the general weather conditions and as a result would decide on the course to be taken, flying height and the speed of the airship. He would also advise the amount of fuel and water ballast to be carried. The captain of the airship was entirely responsible for the preparation of the ship for the flight and that it was air worthy and well founded in all respects before the flight commenced. He was responsible for maintaining the ship and correct flying trim throughout the flight and carrying out the general orders in regard to course, engine speeds, etc., as laid down by the assistant director flying. He was entirely responsible for the flying organization of the ship and the discipline of the crew. To help Erwin understand better, Higgins continued with an analogy. Scott's role was like that of a senior officer in charge of the flight of airplanes proceeding from, say, Cairo to Cape Town. This senior officer would issue orders to all pilots of the machines as to the height at which to fly, the course to be taken, and the arrangements made for communicating with him during flight. This scenario left Scott in charge of scheduling flights and so the responsibility for departing to India without a proper test flight lies with him. Yet ultimately the greatest share of blame for the R-101 disaster rests on the shoulders of Lord Thompson. At every step in R-101's development, Thompson, the Secretary of State for Air, used the airship for PR stunts, a tee or a tour or a ride for a VIP. These requests, which often arrived via Thompson's aid Major Louis Reynolds, burdened the overworked Erwin in Atherston. I wonder, Atherston thought, if Reynolds realizes what Erwin is up against, because if he does, then he ought to be publicly shot for putting such almost impossible tasks to us. Although this meddling diverted Erwin and Atherston from testing the airship and training its crew, of graver consequence was Thompson's belief that R-101 was an all-weather craft. Throughout R-101's year of flying, Thompson never grasped the airship's limitations. In early October, when he invited the MPs for a ride, he wished for a fresh breeze of 40 to 50 miles per hour, to show them that the ship does not roll much. A few days later, after his ride on R-101's second flight, Thompson told reporters he rather regretted that the weather conditions were so fair, and that he hoped for a stronger wind as he wished to see the behavior of the airship in rough weather. Later that month, after the work's meteorological office forecast bad weather with gale-force winds, R-101 was moved from tower to shed. As predicted, a tremendous storm roared through the British Isles, sweeping from the southwest across Ireland, where the rain and hail ripped tiles and bricks from roofs. Then it hit Wales, where it flooded hundreds of homes, driving families to the rooftops. It smashed into England's south coast, and created waves that beat against Admiralty Pier, and that rose as high as the gallery of the lighthouse. Yet Thompson objected to sheltering R-101. He expressed his displeasure to Sir John Higgins, who relayed to the work's senior management that the Secretary of State was rather annoyed at the airship being put back into the shed because of the storm, and that he thought it unnecessarily cautious. Higgins defended the works, he explained rather fully to Thompson that it was culpably foolish to leave an untested R-101, and it only flew in twice, at the tower. And eight months after the MP's flight canceled because of bad weather, Thompson told delegates that the fourth Imperial Press Conference that airships could fly to Perth by passing through the roaring forties, the powerful westerly winds in the southern hemisphere, that swept 16th century ships from Europe to the East Indies. These winds, he claimed, would be no problem for British airships, because we now have some magnificent skippers training in this country who can handle their ships in the most appalling conditions. And on R-101's flight to India, he hoped to ride the storm, as he wrote to a friend. His belief in the all-weather performance of airships prompted him often to quote a zeppelin expert that an airship is the safest conveyance on land, sea, or in the air that human ingenuity has yet devised. This belief led Thompson to deviate from the original plan for developing giant airships. Higgins countered a slow and sure policy. He told Thompson that the right policy to pursue is to go steadily on with the progressive experiments, and thus to enable the full results of our extensive program to be achieved. But under Thompson, the work's mission crept from the development of experimental crafts to the construction of commercial airships ready to heft large payloads to India. Once R-101 was viewed as a commercial ship, Thompson's influence pressured the work's management, chiefly Colmore and Scott, into grave errors. The first year was to insert the additional bay before the flight to India. When the work's first proposed a refit to increase the airship's lift, they suggested a two-part plan, shave weight, fly to India, then, after that demonstration flight, split the ship in two and add an extra bay. In relation to the future operation of the ship, wrote the works in bureaucratic prose, as distinct from the first demonstration flight to India, an important improvement can be obtained by inserting an additional bay in the structure. The work's proposed this additional bay so R-101 could have enough lift to operate between Britain and India a few months out of the year. Colmore at least realized that R-101 could not fly in any weather, but could, with the extra lift from a new bay, travel on longer flights in the summer over the sea where the air was smooth. The works noted that the additional bay could not, of course, be carried out in time for the first flight is now proposed. Yet Thompson pushed for the bay to be added before the India trip. The best course he responded when asked to approve this plan would I think be, A, to make the various alterations you suggest, B, to insert the extra bay, C, to make every effort for a flight with 55 tons disposable load to India and back at the end of September 1930. The time spent installing this new bay would have been better used on a full test of the ship and the replacement of the entire cover. The ship should have traveled to India with the most minimal of crew or better, the demonstration flight should have been canceled once the works decided the ship was too heavy for regular service to India. The second error was to tie R101's departure date for India to Thompson's political needs. In December 1929, Thompson let the works know through Higgins that he would like R101 ready to go to India by the last week of September. He wanted the flight to proceed or overlap with the Imperial Conference at which he planned to pitch an ambitious extension of the airship program to delegates from across the empire. In response, Higgins cautioned Thompson that R101 might not be ready. I told the Secretary of State, Higgins reported and kept on telling him verbally all along from quite early in the year that he must not count absolutely on the airship being ready to go out to India and that unless when we tried it, it was satisfactory, he would not be able to go at that time. And the director of the works, Reginald Colmore, cautioned that the breakup of the Southwest Monsoon occurs about this time, generally about the middle of September, and squally conditions must be expected from then on to about the middle of November. It would be preferable to carry out the flight either before the break of the monsoon or say late in November as the conditions on the route are likely to be considerably more favorable. Colmore knew the weather well. He always carried in his pocket a report based on studies by the works meteorologists that showed the estimated fuel requirements for the England-India route for every month of the year and would frequently pull it out and discuss its implications with others at the works. Colmore also questioned the importance attached to the flight taking place in late September. But he learned that if the ship did not succeed in getting the Secretary of State for Air to India in time for him to arrive home for the Imperial Conference, no further money would be available for airship development and none would be asked for. And he succumbed to that fear of losing the entire program. Colmore and Scott felt pressured to set our 101's departure date no later than October 4th. Any date after that in Thompson would miss the conference. That departure date was biased, said Booth, the experienced captain of R-100, by the fact that the Imperial Conference coming off and the psychological moment in airships when they could carry the Secretary of State to India and bring him back to time. It biased their judgment agreeing to fly. If that Imperial Conference had not been coming off, I feel confident that they would have insisted upon more trials as was done in the case of R-100 before she left for Canada. Colmore yielded to the pressure to schedule the departure time to the Imperial Conference and even quietly arranged for an Imperial Airways plane to be on standby to return Thompson to England should the conditions not be ideal for R-101 to return from India in time to deliver the Secretary of State to the Imperial Conference. The pressure on Colmore and others at the works was noted by Alfred Pugsley, a young engineer at the Royal Airship Works, later knighted for his contributions to engineering. All were agreed, Pugsley recalled, the governmental and indeed popular pressure led by Lord Thompson and his enthusiasm for the journey to India had at the last stages unduly hurried and hurried designers, constructors, and crew alike. And so driven to depart by Thompson's political strategy, an untested R-101 flew into tremendous storms. And although the management failed the airship, the airship also failed its management. In 1926, Britain's director of civil aviation hailed R-101 as the greatest adventurer in construction engineering of our time and yet in charge was Vincent Richmond, R-101's chief designer, a man with no training in engineering and no experience in designing any airborne craft. Richmond studied chemistry at the Royal College of Science and his sole practical experience with airships was in creating the waterproof finish applied to the outer cloth covers of airships and small military balloons. His engineering experience was limited to a short stent before the First World War designing docks for S. Pearson and Sons, a large construction firm. Sometimes Richmond's decision shocked his engineering staff. When he ordered the gas bag netting let out to gain more lift, a works engineer noted that this violated the essential feature of Michael Rope's careful design. To make up for Richmond's sketchy technical training, his staff at the works had to balance the gaps in his engineering knowledge, as a colleague discreetly phrased it, or as another delicately said, they supplemented his technical knowledge. For example, Harold Roxby, an engineer at the works, pointed out to Richmond an error in his design for R101's framework. The cross section of the ship near the tail would not be symmetric and this would disrupt airflow over the airship. The cigar-shaped framework of all airships arose from a set of rings spaced along a central axis and linked from back to front by long girders. At least 20 of these girders, Roxby explained to Richmond, were used on all airship designs but because Richmond designed R101 with only 15 girders, the cross section of R101 as it tapered to its tail lost its symmetrical nearly circular shape. Roxby pleaded with Richmond to increase the number of girders but Richmond dismissed the suggestion. When R101's framework was assembled, the section near the tail was indeed a distorted circle. Roxby solved the problem by retrofitting and action never desired by an engineer. He had the girders twisted as they neared the tail to keep the cross section circular. After R101's crash, the young Roxby thrived as an aeronautical engineer and his development of the gas-powered turbine for jets earned him a knighthood. Criticism of Richmond's R101 design wasn't limited to the work staff. Two of the greatest airship engineers of Richmond's era thought R101's framework deficient. Ludwig Dier, the chief architect for the Zeppelin Company, praised R101 in public. I regard R101 as one of the best airships ever designed in construction, he told Richmond a month before the ship's crash. But in private, he expressed reservations about the design. Dier worried that the ship's unbrazed rings, in contrast to the wire spokes of the Zeppelin frame, could never be made light enough. Their weight, he thought, reduced payload and fuel, which hampered R101's potential as a commercial vehicle because its range would be far too short. And even more severe was the opinion of Britain's most experienced airship designer. Barnes Wallace designed four of R101's predecessors, number nine in 1916, number 23 in 1917, number 26 in 1918, and R80 in 1920. From 1924 to 1928, he designed R100 contemporaneous with Richmond's design of R101. Although the designs of both R100 and R101 were state secrets, Richmond sent uninvited drawings of R101 to Wallace. It is the crudest piece of design which I've ever seen, Wallace thought, when he reviewed the work. He dismissed Richmond as a mere works manager and not a technologist in any sense of the word. As he bundled the drawings to return to Richmond, Wallace concluded that R101 was a mass of mistakes and unfit to fly. He tacked an icy note to the returned papers and tell it has been shown unsatisfactory. I prefer the arrangements we have worked out for R100. Two factors propelled Richmond to the top ranks of British airship designers. First, although he had no practical experience designing airships, he hand for a British citizen a singular store of theoretical knowledge of Zeppelin designs because of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty mandated that dirigibles able to take the air, being manufactured, repaired or assembled must be delivered to the governments of the principal allied and associated powers. To accomplish this, the victors formed an inter-allied commission. As Britain's representative, Richmond toured Germany free to inspect every Zeppelin ship, visit every airship factory and view blueprints of the most advanced designs of the Zeppelin engineers. Richmond showed such interest on his tours that the German officer in charge of the Choutalon's works and now forgotten rival of the Zeppelin company reported to his superiors, I got the impression that Mr. Richmond will probably take up airship matters in the future. He continued, Mr. Richmond seems to be interested in an airship undertaking in England or India. Yet theoretical knowledge, however detailed, was not enough alone to catapult him to the top ranks because Britain had experienced airship designers, Barnes Wallace, of course, but also CIR Campbell. Campbell was chief designer of airships and superintendent of the Royal Airship Works. He was undoubtedly, claim flight, a British aviation magazine, our foremost airship designer. Campbell designed, in 1921, the British Airship R-38 at the time the largest airship in the world, although small enough to fly through the central ring of R-101 with 20 feet to spare on each side. To create this airship, Campbell drew, in contrast to Richmond, on years of engineering training and experience. After graduating with the highest honors in engineering from the Royal Naval College, Campbell designed and built seagoing ships for the Navy. Until in 1915, they put him in charge of old airship design in the Admiralty where he honed his skills. The outcome of that training was R-38, the first ship of purely British design reported flight and not a copy of previous German ships. In the early morning of August 24th, 1921, R-38 took to the sky for a day of flight. Campbell rode on the ship as an observer as did his design team, the cream of the airship services at flight. In the late afternoon, R-38 sped through the air, piercing a bank of white clouds to emerge into the sunlight as the crew and high spirits tested the ship's controls at high speed. Over an estuary of the North Sea near Hall, the ship's captain ordered the fin controls to be moved rapidly to show the airworthiness of R-38 to cross the Atlantic. The crew heard a violent crack, then a few sharp explosions followed by two loud explosions that shattered windows and hundreds of shops and rattled houses two miles away. The ship's backbone, its metal framework snapped in two, landing golfed in flames, R-38 plunged into the Humber River. 45 of the 51 on board died among the dead were Campbell and his team. The disaster robbed Britain of its most capable airship experts, leaving few in the government's employ with knowledge of airship design. When Britain decided in 1924 to revive its airship program, they turned to one of the few who had worked on British airships, Vincent Richmond. This accidental engineer was charged with designing R-101, a task described by R.V. Suthwall nighted years later for his technical achievements, as hard as can be set before an engineering designer. Although Richmond intended to design a novel and radical airship to a British standard that surpassed the time-tested Zeppelin designs, he instead created an overweight airship. To avoid a structural failure like R-38s, Richmond decided upon a framework with thick, heavy rings, lack the engineering finesse, to design a strong yet lightweight structure. This heavy framework required a last-minute refit to gain 14 tons of lift. The time spent on this refit would have been better used for more test flights, which perhaps might have detected problems with the ship's cover long before its flight to India. In some then, this overweight airship also carried a burden created by the political structures surrounding it. Lord Thompson and Major Scott created an environment where they and their underlings overrode the safety recommendations of inspectors, violated safety regulations by approving flights to serve public relations needs, and overworked R-101's officers by requiring them to double as watchkeepers. The result was a confluence of four interlinked factors that destroyed R-101, navigational errors by an overworked and sleep-deprived crew, abnormally stormy weather, the weakness of the ship's outer cloth cover, and the storage of water-activated flares in the control car. These events resulted in R-101's dive into a grove of trees and its subsequent explosion as it skidded across the ground.