 Part 1. The Airship Rises Chapter 1. The Debut of the Great British Airship October 12, 1929 Along the road leading to the Royal Airship Works, 45 miles north of London, on the farmlands of the Bedfordshire Plain, 15,000 cars were jammed into 3,000 temporary spots earmarked for spectators. They arrived to watch Britain's huge new airship, R101, emerge for the first from its protective shed, a 4,000-ton building so immense that Westminster Abbey could be tucked into a corner with room next to it for a football field. Between the cars treaded thousands of locals on motorcycles and bicycles and hundreds more on foot. Most had arrived long before sunrise, a few lit fires along the roadside and grilled bacon for breakfast as they waited for the debut of R101. Latecomers were moved along by the local police stationed every 100 yards along the four miles of road closest to the Royal Airship Works, often referred to as the Works for short. Officers from nearby counties had been drafted in to help because the crowds arriving to view R101 surpassed those at Britain's most popular horse races, the Derby and the Grand National, and exceeded the attendances at royal events. Spectators flocked from as far north as Newcastle and as far west as Swansea. They arrived in thousands of cars and hundreds of buses weaving for miles through the gentle hills of Bedfordshire, forming a segmented black line that looked like a worm crawling along the countryside. The fascination with R101 reflected the people's love of machines, especially of those that tested the extremes of size and speed. They were eager to win the triple crown of land, sea, and airspeed records, they rooted for Malcolm Campbell as he roared across the Pendine Sands and Wales at 146 miles per hour in his car sunbeam. They cheered on J. G. Perry Thomas as he broke that record by reaching 178 miles per hour across the Sands, then gasped when his car's chain flew loose and it creamed out of control killing him. Britain celebrated when Henry Seagraves set the world's water speed record in his thousand horsepower golden arrow. Only a few years later he died during 100 miles per hour in the Miss England too. When his boat crashed he hung on to life long enough to ask his crew, did we do it? No machine fascinated the public as much though as anything that flew and this enthusiasm for aviation was spurred by the press especially the sensational Daily Mail. It declared that flying was a new faculty, a new power, a fresh revolution, the greatest conceivable in human transit. The newspapers championed flight by offering cash to entice Britain's pilots to set world records. Their 10,000 pound prize in 1919 for the first transatlantic flight motivated Henry Hawker of the Sopwith Company to try the crossing. Lindbergh wouldn't achieve that feat solo until 1927. On a clear day in May 1919 Hawker and his co-pilot prepared their Sopwith plane by straining its oil six times then packed two sandwiches on a thermos of coffee. As they took off from Newfoundland for the Irish coast Daily Mail readers waited with anticipation for news of their arrival. When Hawker and his co-pilot disappeared the newspapers bombarded readers with daily headlines, still no news, gravest fears entertained followed by small hopes for Hawker. A few days later the paper screamed in a banner headline Hawker safe. The plane had crashed five hours into its flight and a steamer without radio had rescued Hawker and his co-pilot. This sensational news bumped off the front page the recently signed Treaty of Versailles. The latest aviation sensation was R-101, the largest craft in the world, almost a third larger than its rival Germany's Graf Zeppelin which had launched in 1928. The British read in the press of the certain triumph of R-101, the world today, and illustrated magazine of national efficiency and social progress, proclaimed in a headline that his majesty's airship R-101 was a triumph of aeronautical design. The airship was, the magazine declared, a modern magic carpet of tangible and progressive reality which easily eclipses anything of this kind that has been attempted. The illustrated London news printed lavish two-page spreads about R-101 often featuring an overwrought artist's impression of the mighty airship. No detail was too recondite to be celebrated. The illustrated news called it a marble of engineering skill and a beautiful example of British craftsmanship. The popular magazine Flight remarked on the simplicity of the joints that held together his majesty's airship, and now after five years of planning and construction, the public would finally see this autumn morning in 1929 the new wonder of aviation. Inside the mammoth shed, First Officer Noel Atherston leaned out of a hatch above the nose of R-101. The ship floated only a few feet above the floor of its shed, but Atherston's perch was eighty feet above the ground. To brace himself for the eminent movement of the airship, he pressed his hips against the hatch's rim, then grasped the edge of the opening. His fingers slipped on the plasticized cloth cover comprising the outer surface of the airship, so he tightened his grip. The fresh coating on the cover emitted a slightly acidic odor, almost like banana oil, although to Atherston it smelled vinegar and burned in his nose. No matter, he had to concentrate on the task at hand, the safe departure of R-101 from its giant shed. When the four hundred and seventy-ton fortress-like hangar doors opened, Atherston felt a slight breeze. He worried that his R-101 accident of wind gusts would smash the ship into the shed's door frame and destroy the airship even before its first flight, the fate, eight years earlier in 1921, of one of R-101's five predecessors. He and the builders of R-101 had worked furiously for five years to get to this day, and the pride of the British Empire relied on this first small step of safe transit from the shed to the mooring tower. The only sound in the shed were the rattle of the pull chains from the hand-powered winches used to open the doors and the grunts of the six men operating the winches, as the doors parted light spilled from the brightly lit shed into the pre-dawn darkness. Inside, the 732-foot-long airship floated lightly a few feet off the ground. Its new coating, infused with aluminum particles gleamed silver, the hull a shiny contrast with a dark floor of the shed. R-101's immensity, when viewed from the floor of the shed, nearly the largest building in the British Empire, often induced dizziness in first-time visitors. The graceful lines of the cigar-shaped ship guided everyone's gaze to its rounded nose, exposed through the open doors. Up front and high up, Atherston prepared himself for the ship's movement as the echo of the door winch chains faded. The ship was now ready to emerge, and the shed fell silent. A shrill whistle broke the silence. From the front of the shed, Major George Scott, a senior official at the Royal Airship Works, lifted his megaphone and commanded in a convoise, walk the ship forward. Four hundred men began to tug the floating ship into the dawn. Two hundred of them had spent the last four years building the ship full three years longer than expected. The ship's completion had been promised in the words of a frustrated observer between 1926 and the day of judgment. The rest of the men were soldiers from a nearby Royal Air Force Base, or locals from a labour exchange. The latter earned one shilling and six pints an hour, about thirty-five cents. One cluster of men gripped a metal lattice on the control car, the lowest part of the ship, which was protected by a temporary, wicker basket bumper. Another group held grips on each of the five exterior engine cars, most though tugged on ropes tied to the ship from nose to tail. R101, powered only by the men walking it forward, moved through the doorway at a brisk two hundred feet a minute, more than two miles an hour. The door frame was only twenty-five feet wider than the ship on each side, so R101 had to pass straight through the centre of the opening. As the men hold the floating ship toward the shed's doors, Atheston gazed at the white guidelines painted on the grass outside the doorway. From his perch atop the ship, he sighted down the nose and watched its alignment with the centre line. He stood ready to shout orders if the airship deviated from this path. Two lines on the outside marked the edges of the ship and guided the men tugging on the ropes. Those underneath clutched the frame of the control car, following the centre line, while staring at a shot-filled white bag that dangled from the ship's nose. They kept this plumb line dead over the centre line as they walked the ship forward. Everyone stayed mute as Atheston, a former Royal Navy officer and a strict taskmaster, had reminded the crew at every drill over the last eleven days of the cartel rule for airship-handling crews. Silence is golden. In three and a half minutes, the ship's giant rudder, ten times taller than the tailfin of a Boeing 747, cleared the door frame, missing the top of the opening by a mere twenty feet. When the ship's tail left the shed, a crew member at the rear of the craft shouted to Major Scott, all clear, sir. Outside for the first time, R101 looked in the grey half-light of dawn, like a silver cloud hovering near the ground. As the mighty airship floated in the open air, just above their heads, the crew roared in unison, releasing their pent-up emotions. This enthusiastic outburst even comforted the stoic Atheston, enforcer of crew discipline as this small success brought him closer to his dream of the last ten years, to captain a giant airship. He hoped to take full command of R101 when its current captain was promoted to the next airship to be built. The works planned to construct a behemoth with twice the volume of R101. These airships would run a regular service from England to India. In only a few months, if all went to plan, R101 would fly to Karachi, India as its long distance demonstration flight. First, though, the ship must safely arrive at its mooring tower. In preparation for R101's movement to its mooring tower, a half mile away, Atheston climbed down a fifteen-foot ladder, careful not to bump the delicate gas bags only a foot away. The outer cloth covers protected the gas bags from inclement weather, but inside the bags were exposed, and so from time to time a careless worker put a foot through one. Atheston stepped from the ladder onto the witch platform at the ship's nose, glanced to be sure the three crew members were ready to pay out cable when the ship reached its mooring tower, then scurried down a short ladder to the interior gangway that ran along the bottom of the ship. As he walked, the floor flexed below him. To reduce the ship's weight, the floors were three-ply, wood stiffened with spruce, although visitors walking on them for the first time often feared they would break through and plummet to the ground. When Atheston reached the middle of the ship, he shot down another short ladder into the control car slung under the ship. He took his place next to his superior officer, R101's captain, H. Carmichael Irwin. Still powered only by the handling party, the whale-like ship moved crab-wise at a stately one mile per hour across the flat 300-acre field next to the shed. At the field's edge, a farmer on horseback corralled herds of grazing sheep and cattle to keep them from blocking the airship's path. The eerie movement of R101 across the field cost the thousands of bicycles, cars, and buses carrying spectators to halt as their drivers watched spellbound. Those who had gathered along the fence since pre-dawn looked on in awe. They all expected a loud sound from an object so large, next to it the handling party looked like a swarm of busy ants, yet the ship emitted no noise. Its vastness contrasted with its weightlessness to create a dissonant image. The ship floated, as one observer put it, as lightly as thisled down. R101 was held aloft by fifteen hydrogen-filled gas balloons arranged inside the airship's middle frame and cloth cover like peas in a pod running from bow to stern. The largest bag would fill St. Paul's dome, the smallest a tenth the volume, yet could still lift a ton. The bags contained enough hydrogen that a single spark could ignite the gas and destroy the ship and its shed. Flammable hydrogen seems a poor choice for an airship compared to inert helium, yet for a commercial airship, hydrogen is the only choice. The lighter hydrogen lifts more weight than helium. Substituting helium for hydrogen in R101 would cut the payload by nearly 50%. The airship could lift its crew, but not fuel, passengers, or baggage. Beyond the loss of lift, helium's cost prohibited its use on a large scale. For Britain to buy the five million cubic feet of helium needed to inflate R101 would cost about £180,000, a huge sum, in 1929. To extract helium from natural gas required expensive distillation plants near the gas wells. The largest gas fields, and so the largest supply of helium, were in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. So not only would the works have to buy the helium from the U.S., they would have to pay to have it shipped to Britain. In contrast, hydrogen was manufactured cheaply and on-site at the works from steam. Five million cubic feet cost £2,500. Although today we fixate on the dangers of hydrogen, to those building and flying airships in the 1920s, the dangers were overrated. To the uninstructed minds at one of the engineers designing R101, danger of fire in airships is generally thought to be due to the presence of hydrogen. The fuel on board was more deadly, he went on, if the fate of an airship carrying from 20 to 50 tons of briskly burning petrol whether inflated with hydrogen or helium is contemplated, it will be readily realized that the advantages in the use of helium are not so obvious it would at first sight appear. An officer of R100 noted that, the thought of potential danger from hydrogen never entered my head nor I think that of any other airship pilots or crews. If it had, I doubt if any of us would have ventured to fly. Of course, in the back of our minds we were aware of its presence and took all precautions against risk of fire. Does anyone nowadays think of the potential danger from fire in the petrol in the tank of their motor car? One does not, of course, lie to match to see if there's any in the tank. Addison had earlier that day enforced all the proper precautions, no hopnail boots, only rubber-soled shoes that could not spark, no smoking, though he craved a cigarette, and no motorized vehicles within four miles of the field. As the airship traversed the field, Addison, still riding in the glass-paneled control car, watched the ground a few feet below. He remained at full alert because in transit a single gust of wind against the five and a half acres of R101's cloth cover, a surface area more than 100 times that of a 737's wings, could smash the ship into the ground and destroy its metal framework. Suddenly the ship plunged, its nose descending toward the ground, Captain Irwin glanced above his head at the gauges that reported the pressures in the ship's 15 gas bags. A rear gas bag contained more hydrogen than those near the front, so Irwin actuated a valve on the air and gas bag to release its excess hydrogen. In seconds the ship righted itself. Irwin's rapid response impressed Atherston, even though he had observed Irwin's skill as a pilot many times in the first world war. In the war the two men had patrolled the channel in an airship about a fifth the size of R101 on the lookout for U-boats. Irwin had served like now as captain and Atherston his first officer. They worked well together despite their contrasting temperaments. Irwin was sensitive, warm, his emotions rising quickly to the surface, but always with a ready smile. Atherston introspective and often tough on his men. They contrasted also in appearance. Carmichael Byrd Irwin was a tall, athletic Irishman with the reddest of hair and pinkest of skin, less than a year older than the 34-year-old Atherston. Noel Grabby Atherston was a smaller man with rounded shoulders and slavic complexion. The nickname Grabby was derived from his original last name, Gromowski, when he married he had taken his wife's last name. Now 11 years later these two singularly talented war time pilots worked in peacetime as a team to test and pilot this giant airship that would connect the far-flung dominions, mandates, and states of the British Empire. Twenty minutes after leaving a jet, the airship neared the dome-covered mooring tower built in the middle of the field far from any buildings. At the top of this 200-foot tower, R101 would be tethered by its nose, free to rotate with the wind around the tower head. The ship halted a few feet from the tower's base, and crew members on the ground removed the wicker basket protecting the control car. To prepare for the mooring, the spry Atherston returned to the ship's nose, climbing from the control car to the ship's walkway and back up a ladder. Major Scott, who had walked along the ground on the airship's low journey across the field, opened the door to the control car, and the wicker basket now gone, and tried to haul himself in to join Captain R101. The door's threshold was just a few feet off the ground, but Scott, a small, pudgy man, struggled to get in. Only a few years earlier he had been a boisterous, boish-looking man through the best parties at the works. But now, age 41, he had a punch, pasty white skin, and dark circles under his eyes. When Atherston arrived in the nosecote, he was pleased that his crew had already paid out the ship's mooring cables, one main cable to hook to the top of the tower, and two guy wires to pass through large eyelets on the ground. He leaned over the forwardmost winch and looked at the ground through a window under the ship's nose. Outside, two members of the ground crew joined the ship's main cables to the 25-ton tower cable, while others connected the guy wires. Once the cable was secured, Atherston drew a voice pipe in close and told Irwin and the control car that R101 was ready to ascend. Atherston pressed the voice pipe close to his ear, and waited for an acknowledgement in Irwin's Irish lilt. He heard instead the soft voice of Major Scott. He often sounded almost embarrassed to be speaking. Atherston abhorred this interference. Irwin, the ship's captain, should be in charge. The First World War had drilled into Atherston the necessity of a proper chain of command. Before teaming up with Captain Irwin in a larger patrol airship, he had flown a small military blimp a hundredth the size of R101. He had searched the English Channel for subtle signs of German U-boats, the distinctive feather wake of a periscope, traces of oil, or a gathering of gulls. One of his fellow pilots described the work as utter boredom. Yet the monotonous patrols, often conducted in foul weather, heartened Atherston mentally and physically. They moulded him into a calm, cool, analytical man as one of his colleagues at the works observed, much respected by his fellows, but a bit tough, and taught him the need for order, routine, and a clear chain of command. Major Scott had violated this code by pulling rank on Captain Irwin. Soon after his message was acknowledged, Atherston felt the ship jerk as water ballast poured from a vent two or three feet below him. Thus lightened, the ship inched up, its rate of ascent increasing as it rose. Atherston wanted the airship to float high above the tower's top, so the main cable would not entangle itself with the tower. There was a problem. At the tower's top, two hundred feet above the ground, R101 halted. To continue its rise, Scott or Irwin in the control car, Atherston couldn't be sure, discharged more ballast. The water spread into a fine mist. It sparkled in the early morning light. As he listened to the rush of the draining water, Atherston timed its rate of discharge, too slow for an emergency. The first blast of ballast, having been discharged, he waited for the ship to rise. It didn't budge. Another half-ton burst, still no motion, a half-ton more than another half-ton of water, which by then had drenched the crew below. Finally the nose slowly rose, and the main cable between ship and tower lifted from the ground. R101 crept to six hundred feet above the ground, four hundred feet above the tower head. Atherston relaxed momentarily, the most perilous stage of the ship's journey complete. A crucial step in the morning was done, but another vital maneuver remained to be completed successfully. The British Empire's newest airship was now in its element, safely floating high in the scarlet morning sky, flecked with clouds of pale gold. In that light, the airship's metallic, egg-shaped engine cars glittered as if on fire. Its shiny cover refracted the early morning sunlight into a rainbow of colors. From this height, Atherston surveyed the entire grounds of the Royal Airship Works. A half mile away said Shed No. 1, which R101 had just left, and next to it the slightly larger Shed No. 2. A quarter mile further on, on a small hill, stood the red brick building that housed the drawing office, the paint shop that created the plastic coating for the ship's cover, and the fabric shop where hundreds of women constructed the ship's gas bags. He gazed at the horizon, marveling at the size of the crowds who had come out to see this magnificent creation. Atherston's reverie was cut short by the roar of the starboard forward engine. To carry passengers, the airship had to be winched in closer to the tower, and attached so that passengers and crew could walk along a gangway from near the top of the tower into the airship. Unlike German Zeplins, the British didn't load their giant airships from the ground. First, R101 had to pull the cable taut. The force from the propeller drew the airship away from the tower, which could withstand a 30-ton pole. Each of the tower's four legs were embedded in a piece of concrete, 12 feet square buried 6 feet into the ground. As the ship backed up, Atherston inspected through the nose-cone window a metal, bull-shaped pendant threaded on the main cable. It dangled from the ship's nose and rattled as it knocked against the ship's underside. When the cable between the ship and the tower became taut, the pendant hung a few feet from the ship's nose. Atherston sighted along the taut cable to a telescopic arm of the tower head. Attached to this arm was a cup, the female counterpart of the cone. Through the center of this cup the main cable was threaded. When the tower's cup mated with the ship's cone, separated now by 400 feet, R101 would be moored. To begin this step of the mooring, the tower crew ran up a white signal flag to alert Atherston in the nose and Irwin in the control car that they would soon haul in the ship. On the tower a gong clanged. At the tower's base three steam-powered winches, one for each cable, pulled the ship toward the tower. Every 20 seconds the winch drew R101 15 feet closer. In about 10 minutes, when the pendant on R101's main cable was 50 feet from the tower head's cup, the winches pulling on the yaw guy wires were stopped and the main winch slowed to a crawl. The steel pendant inched toward the cup on the telescopic arm until the pendant pushed back spring-loaded latches in the cup with a crisp snap, a sound Atherston thought most gratifying. Finally, three men clinging like flies to the telescopic arm inserted heavy locking pins to secure the airship. Once it was locked in, a small motor shortened the arm to a length of eight feet and righted it to vertical. Atherston and his crew in the cone stood motionless and quiet. Atherston pressed his ear to the voice pipe. Ship secured, Irwin said. Atherston ordered his crew to drop the ventral hatch under R101's nose. This transformed the airship into a silver sky-wheel with its mouth agape ready to bite the tower a few feet away. To close this gap the tower crew extended a flexible bridge to the airship which connected it to the passenger platform, a large disc 40 feet in diameter covered in thick steel plate textured to keep passengers from slipping during inclement weather. As passengers boarded the airship across the narrow bridge they had a chill inducing view of the ground 170 feet below. Yet their boarding could be even more thrilling. Wheels on the bottom of the bridge allowed it to revolve around the tower as the ship swung with the wind. For the rest of the day Atherston supervised the final steps of mooring. He kept careful watch as his crew connected the water main fuel and hydrogen lines. He reminded them to ground the ship before plugging in the electrical cables and stringing the leads to the control car for the portable telephone. One could dial Bedford 2255 and ring R101. Atherston followed the telephone leads through the corridor that ran along the ship's belly until he arrived at the control car. From there he watched workers connect the four garden roller ballast to lay on the field below, cylindrical tubes with an axle along their long axis. As the ship moved around the tower those ballast rolled on the field below stabilizing it against updrafts. In the evening Atherston turned R101 over to a small crew of half a dozen or so, the minimum needed to maintain the ship when locked at the tower. His work done for the day he headed home to his wife, two children, and his German shepherd Tim. As Atherston left the works he glanced back at R101. It gleamed silver in the setting sun. At the tower the ship would safely swing, roll, rise and fall with the wind. To him the ship rode beautifully at the mast, yet he knew much hard work lay ahead. Just that day he had learned that the number three gas bag leaked, the cloth cover on the fins fluttered too much, and the water ballast discharged too slowly. Yet he felt everything was coming together. The mooring gear worked well, the ship's cloth cover stayed intact, and even his crew was beginning to shake down very quickly. He always feared what he called a second-hand crew. That night he jotted in his journal, very tired but happy about the ship as she promises well.