 Part 3 A New Airship Chapter 8 Departure for India October 4, 1930 From the base of the mooring tower Major Scott surveyed the newly lengthened R-101 above him. Its silvery cloth cover was dove-white against the dull, gray October sky. In the still air the airship floated motionless, but soon, as Scott knew from the dropping barometric pressure, stormy weather would arrive. Because of this he hoped to slip the tower before the scheduled departure of six o'clock and an hour away, but R-101's principal passenger Lord Thompson was yet to arrive. Ready to hasten Thompson aboard, Scott waited at the base of the tower, pipe in hand. Scott was confident of a successful flight to India. A few hours earlier he paraded a visitor by the new bay, explained how it was bolted into place and perhaps thought like Irwin that the lengthened ship handled better than went shorter. Scott believed the whale-like ship's demonstration flight to India would secure his reputation as an aviation pioneer. Historians would celebrate, he thought, his heroic Atlantic crossing as the pivotal event in developing commercial airships, when, in the future, the public crossed continents and traversed oceans and larger airships. Scott turned as a car rattled along the road leading to the tower, but it was only the work's green Trojan van driven by the boy's second officer, Maurice Steff, accompanied by Albert Savage, the ship's steward. At the tower the two men unloaded the truck and filled the elevator with fresh food for the flight. Meat, vegetables, bread, barrel and oxo-cubes for soup or a hot drink, and a cask of ale. As he watched Scott drew in on his pipe, then, when the elevator doors shut, he again turned to the road. In the late afternoon light his pasty skin contrasted with a crisp blue of his new uniform, his slouch at odds with a straight sharp crease in his new trousers. The new uniforms for officers and crew were a response by the Air Ministry to the visit seven months earlier by R101's rival, the Graf Zeppelin. The Zeppelin officers had walked off their ship in smart blue uniforms, while British airship officers and crew were nondescript civilian clothes. Britain's Air Ministry immediately gave an order for R101's officers to wear a deep blue reefer, a double-breasted jacket, with gold buttons, a peaked hat with a white dust cover and a gilded badge. At the centre of the badge was R101, under this royal airship work circled, and at the top, a crown. As Scott waited, an old friend and reporter approached and asked him why he wore a uniform instead of civilian clothes. I am not a passenger, Scott said, his words slightly slurred. I am the officer in command of the flight. He decided when the ship would sail, her course, her speed, her altitude. Scott's firm response was prompted by the event surrounding the flight of R100 to Canada four months earlier. To eliminate Scott's errors and misjudgments, Sir John Higgins, the civil servant at the Air Ministry overseeing the airship program, in consultation with Colmore, the director of the Royal Airship Works, had assigned Scott as a non-executive admiral. In this role he was not the captain of the ship. He was not the issue any orders to crew members, but could offer advice to the ship's captain who could accept or refuse the advice. Scott chafed at this new role, especially because of the implications drawn from the press briefing for the R100 flight to Canada, listing him as one of the officials from the Royal Airship Works and not as one of the officers of R100. Rumors swirled that Scott had been superseded. When R100 arrived in Canada, he was often introduced as second in command. This hurt Scott. He wanted it clear that he had authority over the ship. On the morning of the day of departure for India, Scott had examined the press guidance for R101's flight. It had the same secondary description of his role. He felt this would once again lead the public to believe that he was a passenger with no responsibility for the flight. He cornered the Air Ministry press officer and complained that this was far from being the case, because if anything happens on this flight, I will be held responsible. Scott insisted the press brief be changed, but was told it was too late to do so. To appease Scott, however, the Air Ministry press officer consulted with Colmore and others to quickly write a press release to be issued the moment R101 slipped the tower. It contained the sentence, the flight has been carried out under the direction of Major G. H. Scott, assistant director in charge of airship flying. As he waited at the tower, Scott explained his interpretation of this phrase to his friend. He commanded the crew who, he said, must carry out his orders. Scott was still impatiently waiting for Lord Thompson to arrive when two crewmembers passed by with tens of biscuits. He stopped them. We don't need these tens. Put them in paper bags and get the tens off the ship. I want to save every pound of weight I can. Indeed, R101 needed to spare every pound. Overnight, the tower crew stuffed the airship to its limit with essentials. The hydrogen gas had flowed through a 12-inch diameter underground pipe to the tower, where, with great care, workers topped off the gas bags. One crewmember joked, What's the use of pumping gas into a bloody colander? A reference to the holes discovered by Irwin. The hydrogen was produced by Woodus Rogers, a Cornwell man as likely to speak and verse as prose. In the hydrogen plant, Rogers blew steam across four tons of finely ground red hot iron ore which stripped the hydrogen from the steam, leaving the oxygen embedded in the iron and so giving a nearly pure stream of hydrogen gas. The crew balanced the lifting force of the hydrogen with nine and a quarter tons of water ballast and a ton each of drinking water and lubricating oil. And finally they filled the fuel tanks with 25 tons of heavy oil distributed equally around the ship in 30 tanks to keep it in trim. Once the tower crew finished their work, the flying crew arrived to take over. Among that flying crew was Yorkshire-born Joe Banks assigned to the rear-engined car with the Dower Arthur Bell. Banks wore the new uniform of crew members, a reefer jacket with buttons of black instead of the officer's gold. His hat badge constructed of ungilted cloth. He had slung over his shoulder a sit-cut suit, a one-piece wool-lined leather flying suit. When he wore this suit, his fellow crew members thought he looked like an enormous teddy bear. Other than his flying clothes, the lining of his sit-cut suit, a thick sweater, a leather cap, and wool-lined boots, links like all crew members was allowed only 15 pounds of luggage. He carried a small linen satchel of personal items into which he had tucked his vaccination record and passport. The Crown's emigration authorities would inspect the papers of everyone aboard before the ship slipped the tower. Before he walked to the tower, Banks said goodbye to his youngest son, Derek. How sad to miss the boy's fourth birthday three days away. Instead of sharing cake with him, Banks would mark the arrival in Egypt, the end of the first leg with the cask of ale, shared with his 35 crew members, the 70-pound cask carefully apportioned and the ship's manifest as two pounds per crew member. Meanwhile, Harry Leach, the foreman engineer with round rimmed glasses stood nearby trying to console his crying seven-year-old daughter. She worried that her father would not return. As Banks and Leach walked toward the elevator, Leach's wife raced after him and handed him a good luck sprig of white heather. Banks and Leach boarded the ship. Just as Vincent Richmond, R101's designer, arrived at the tower, accompanied by his wife and elderly mother. Richmond thought of R101 as the first ship of a fleet. He was convinced that if the British government and industry spent as much capital on airships as on shipping, the provision of harbors, for example, the airship could achieve the same number of ton miles as the sea-going ships, but in less time. Yet nine months earlier, in January of 1930, Richmond had realized, as he wrote a friend, that a ship the size of R101 is not inherently suitable to carry 100 passengers over journeys to the east of 2,500 miles nonstop at all times of the year. To overcome R101's limitations, Richmond had worked with Michael Rope all year to design the next generation of airships. Richmond characterized the fleet in a speech at the British Association for the Advancement of Science as composed of airships that would constitute the largest moving structures in the world. He added that there is no reason why the airship should not become the safest form of transport yet devised. Richmond had nevertheless stowed in his luggage. He was given a more generous allowance of forty-four pounds, a small metal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers. At five-fifteen p.m., Lord Thompson's chauffeur Blue Domler pulled up to the tower. Scott had wanted Thompson to arrive at five for the six o'clock departure, but his aide thought an hour of rather long time to keep a secretary of state waiting, so on the way they had stopped for tea in Sheffard. Thompson emerged from the Domler in a dark overcoat, accentuated by a white handkerchief in his breast pocket and a black Homburg hat. As he approached Scott, Thompson turned to his aide. This is a voyage I've been waiting for all my life, and more than ever since we started along this airship trail in 1924. I've never looked forward to anything so much. Indeed, he'd hoped for R-101 to fly to India as early as 1927. For Lord Thompson, the success of R-101 and the airship fleet that followed promised to create his all-red girdle of air transport that linked the vast British Empire. This achievement, he felt, would propel him to the top ranks of the government, perhaps as the next viceroy of India or even prime minister. Walking toward the elevator, Thompson asked a crew member for a summary of the weather. It looks, the man said, as though it may blow up a bit with a spot of rain for a short while. It's delighted the air minister. To ride the storm, he had written a friend, has always been my ambition, and who knows but we may realize it on the way to India, but not, I hope, with undue risks to human lives. Just then a slight breeze blew across the fields of the Royal Airship Works, R-101 wobbled at the tower. Just three days earlier, the Imperial Conference, a quadrennial gathering of the Commonwealth leaders, had convened in London. Already gathered in the Foreign Office's Lucarno Suite were all the Commonwealth Prime Ministers, Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa, and United Kingdom. The Maharaja of Bikinir, representing India, and Mr. P. McGilligan for the Irish Free State. With his typical flair for the dramatic and to demonstrate the speed of airships, Thompson intended to travel from Britain to India and return before the end of the 45-day conference. There he would present his ambitious airship program for the Empire. Thompson, a skillful orator, had no doubt rehearsed the scene many times. In his mind's eye, he stood in the barrel vaulted Lucarno reception room and opened by reminding the delegates that he had left for India on October 4, three days after the start of the conference, and returned to meet with them on October 20, the 20th day of the gathering. His travel time from India was a mere four days. He was rested, he told them, because riding in an airship was like sitting there as part of a bubble up in the blue with a feeling of detachment and serenity. An arresting vision for the delegates still exhausted from a grueling 10 to 15 days of travel. With the delegates hooked by a vision of a tranquil, cross-continent journey, Thompson would enthrall them with details of a fleet of next generation supersize airships, ships a third larger than R101. They would zip along at 75 miles per hour and travel 5,000 miles without refueling. To start this fleet, he suggested that the delegates appropriate 2.75 million pounds to build two of these airships, the first constructed in two years and the second in eight months, along with the necessary infrastructure. These new ships would be too large to fit into the sheds at the work, so they had to be enlarged. And mooring towers must be built across the empire. Thompson proposed to start with a second tower to build the works and three towers along imperial routes in New Brunswick Canada for the Atlantic route and in Malta and Basra for the India route. This he predicted would spark a network of towers and in 20 years every seaport in the world would have one. For now this expansive plan and his speech were only on paper though. Thompson planned to refine his speech while en route to and from India in consultation with Richmond. So he told his aide who toted a bulky bag of state papers. I was going to work on them on the voyage but I've got those speeches to draft, letters to write and that conference paper to put together for when we get back. So I'll leave this lot behind. Thompson's aide returned the unnecessary briefcase to the Domler and his boss walked to the mooring tower where he shook Scott's hand and greeted Richmond. They chatted while the green works van pulled up again loaded with Thompson's baggage, two green cabin bags, four suitcases, two 26 pound cases of champagne, a three pound dress sword and a 129 pound carpet. My precious carpet from Sulinamir said Thompson will have it down for dinners at his Malaya and Karachi to do the thing in style. At each mooring point he planned a celebration on board R101 for local officials where as the ship's flight instructions firmly noted the ship's steward will have to supply all crockery and cutlery et cetera and have all tables ready. Once the crew finished loading all 254 pounds of the Air Minister's Luggage, Thompson, Scott, and Richmond entered the elevator. Richmond turned to his wife. Good-bye, he said, and keep the flag flying. The elevator doors snap shut and the men now shadows on the frosted glass joined the other passengers on board. The monocled Sir W. Sefton Branker, Britain's Director of Civil Aviation, Major Percy Bishop and A. I. D. Inspector, Squadron Leader W. Palstra, who observed for the Australian Government, Squadron Leader W. O'Neill, Britain's Deputy Director of Civil Aviation, India, and James Buck, Lord Thompson's valet. Meanwhile, an exhausted Noel Atherston remained at the tower space and smoked his last cigarette before departure. He was drained from ninety-six straight hours of preparation for the India flight. It had begun three days before, on October 1st, with an overnight test flight for the lengthened R101. The ship had flown from the works to London, passed over South End, and spent the night over the East Coast. Atherston and Irwin planned to fly for thirty-six, even forty-eight hours in order to stress test the cloth cover by flying for at least six of the hours with all five engines at full speed. However, after eleven and a half hours, they halted the flight. An oil cooler failure shut down the starboard forward engine and precluded any high-speed tests. At four o'clock in the morning of October 2nd, Atherston took command and guided R101 from Yarmouth at the edge of the North Sea back to the works. He was pleased that the ship handled better than before the refit. He had expected it to be semi-ready and in a nearly totally un-airworthy condition. At six forty-five a.m., Atherston returned to the nose-cone to prepare the cables for landing, and Irwin took command. Then Scott intervened. As the ship approached the tower, he ordered a guy-wire lord too soon. It entangled the tower and delayed the landing by three hours. Atherston hoped Scott would not blunder on the flight to India, that he would only observe as ordered by the air ministry. But Atherston was aware that Scott had disregarded his non-executive status on R100's flight to Canada in late July. Flooding into Quebec, Scott had ordered R100 to pass through a thunderstorm instead of going around it. In the turbulent air, the ship shot up from an altitude of twelve hundred feet to forty-five hundred feet, the last one thousand feet in fifteen seconds. The violent winds ripped the fabric on the starboard elevators. The ship safely arrived in Montreal, but Scott's rash decision could have destroyed it. Although Atherston hoped Scott's status as non-executive admiral would prevent his interference with R101's operation, there was no remedy for Scott's capricious scheduling of the airship's flights. He had sent R101's departure for India early on the morning of October 4th, the mere forty-eight hours after the return from its overnight test flights, no time to move the ship to the shed and conduct a detailed inspection of its cover as Irwin had planned. And for a weary Atherston, the short time-line caused another flap and panic to get everything on the top line. The urgency decreased a little when, a day before the flight, Scott moved the departure from morning to evening. To prepare for the India flight, Atherston supervised the last-minute replacement of a defective emergency trouser-shaped ballast bag and ordered a thorough examination of all the others. He managed the purging and refilling of the gas bags because the hydrogen purity in several of them was low, the oxen skin kept hydrogen from escaping, but let air seep into the bags. Atherston also enforced flight instruction number 32. No photographs are to be taken under any circumstances whatever on the route between the English coast and Egypt while passing over European countries, colonial possessions in North Africa, or the territory of Syria. This instruction must be strictly observed. He confiscated all personal cameras from the crew and passengers and delivered them to Irwin. Only Mr. R. Blake, an engineer in the midship port engine car, was allowed to take pictures of items of interest and route. These items included Lord Thompson, the Secretary of State, in conversation, Irwin and Scott in the control car, and passengers at lunch and in the lounge. Atherston also reminded the passengers and crew that no letters or parcels could be carried. He would enforce a five-pound fine for each letter he found. The minutiae of the orders distracted him from the importance of this flight. For Atherston, his dream of becoming captain of R-101 was at stake. He hoped to take full command of R-101 once the fleet expanded and Irwin was promoted to the newest ship of that fleet. For that to happen, Atherston knew R-101 must dazzle the world. The future of airships, he thought, very largely depends on what sort of show we put up. That show was enhanced by the new uniforms yet, in his opinion, their last minute appearance also highlighted the disarray of the powers that be, his collective term for the work senior staff in the air ministry. When Atherston had argued just a year earlier for new uniforms, the air ministry rejected his suggestion. It was only the Graf Zeppelin's arrival at the works with its smartly uniformed crew that panicked the air ministry into a rush to try to get stuff in time to manufacture uniforms. But they insisted that the men pay for them themselves. The air ministry advanced Atherston and his crew members twenty pounds each to purchase a uniform, another kit for the trip to India, plus five pounds pocket money for subsistence once they reach their destination, typical, he thought, of the air ministry methods. Therefore, although he had confidence in the newly built ship, his doubts about the project management of R-101 led him to think, luck will figure whether conspicuously in our flight. Beyond luck, the journey would also test Atherston's skills as a pilot. He was assigned by Irwin to work the elevators for the flight across England, the most critical task of all, maintaining R-101 at a constant altitude was usually performed by a coxswain, but a forecast of rough air caused Irwin to assign Atherston. No crew member could feel in his boots the motion of R-101 in the air as well as Irwin's trusted wartime colleague, First Officer Noel Atherston. This duty Atherston knew would tax him because he said the ship's captains are in a very difficult position of having the keep watch in flight. This is really quite wrong. In contrast, the Graf Zeppelin carried three watchkeepers besides the captain, and on the U.S. Airship Akron, neither captain nor First Officer kept watch, it carried three watchkeepers and three navigation officers. For the trip to India, Captain Irwin, First Officer Atherston and Second Officer Maurice Steff would rotate in three-hour shifts, a daunting schedule to the sleep-deprived Atherston. He took a long, last drag on a cigarette. They would have no time for the smoking room. At 5.30 p.m., when Atherston stationed himself in the nose cone, the noisy bustle of loading the ship abated, giving way to a tense silence as the crew prepared for the critical steps needed to slip the tower. Through the voice pipe, Irwin commanded, flying stations. At this, Atherston directed his crew to detach the supply pipes for fuel, water, and the cables for electrical power and telephone. Next, he ordered the bridge withdrawn and the ventral hatched closed. The crew and passengers were now isolatos, as Herman Malville once described the crew members on the Piquad. To alert any air traffic that R101 was about to depart, a red light flickered atop the tower. In the reflected glow, the ship's shiny nose shone with a pink-tense shimmer. From the control car, the spotlight shone on the rear-engine car. The light spilled into the car and alerted engineers' binks and bell to prepare for orders. Soon the lights flashed on their telegraph, and its pointer rotated from stop to start low. Binks cranked on the small, gas-driven starter engine. The sound like a lawnmower echoed throughout the grounds of the Royal Airship Works. The small engine drove the pistons of the heavy oil, Beardmore engine, and spasmatic jerks until the larger engine started with a low, throaty rumble. The rear engine was warmed up and ready, so bells slid the telegraph lever to slow to signal the engine status to the control car. The spotlight moved to the midship port engine, where another set of engineers readied their starter engine. Each of the five cars were assigned a crew of two engineers. A single, percussive burst from its starter engine rang out, followed by the low roar of its heavy oil engine. The spotlight flicked to the starboard engine, and forward to the port engine where the same cycle occurred, each starter engine rattling like machine gun fire in the tower's dome. With four engines started, the spotlight was shown in the last engine, the forward starboard engine. The click of the gas fell from its starter engine, the burst of ominous black smoke, then silence. Then a second hiss, and a third, and a fourth, the result only black smoke. On the eighth try, twenty minutes later, a percussive hiss, a burst of white smoke, and the dull roar of the larger engine. As the rumble of all five engines filled the air, Addiston pressed his ear against the voice pipe, anticipating orders from Irwin. Prepare to slip, Irwin said. He wanted all crew in position for slipping. Addiston, the strict task master, already had his crew in place, so he immediately repeated the command to the tower. Prepare to slip. Take the strain off the wire, ordered the officer in charge of the tower. A tower hand turned to wheel and drew the wire tight, ensuring the bowl-shaped pendant rested firmly in the cup at the end of the tower's hefty arm, which still tightly held the airship. Outstops commanded the tower officer. The tower hand withdrew the pins, holding the ship's pendant in the mooring arm. The pins dangled from a chain. It rattled in the wind. Now only a short wire tethered the airship to the tower. With the ship floating freely, Addiston gazed at a small, liquid-filled gauge in the bow, marked in increments a quarter tons heavy and light. This gauge worked like a level to show whether or not R101 was in trim from front to back. The bow also had indicators to measure the yaw and side strain, but these never worked well, so Addiston ignored them. He ordered the tower crew to ease up on the wire to slowly pay out the main cable. The indicator on the bow gauge reported the ship was sinking, so Addiston issued a one-word status to Irwin. Heavy. In response, Irwin released a half ton of water ballast. It cascaded from the ship and fine droplets glittering in the tower's floodlights. Addiston's gauge now indicated light. He reported to Irwin, ship lifting. The gas bags, he told Irwin, were 96% full, and so the ship could rise to a thousand feet. Irwin ordered standby to slip, quickly followed by slip. At 6.36 p.m., the mighty airship was free of the tower. As the cable dropped, a rising wind blew R101 from the tower. Within seconds of departing, the giant airship tilted toward the ground, Irwin quickly ordered the release of four tons of ballast, and the ship's nose slowly righted itself. Or in order from Irwin, the engineers engaged the ship's five propellers. They slowly rotated with a regular muffled beat, not a droning like an airplane, but a clank like a piece of metal beaten rhythmically. The airship rose, its control car glistening in the floodlights, and an oblong luminous rectangle shining from the windows of the promenade decks, where silhouetted figures waved farewell. A few periodic bursts of light appeared from beneath the ship, as crew members signaled with flashlights to family below. At the ship's tail, red and green lights illuminated the union jack on an RAF ensign hung from the rudder. The ensign rippled in the wind as the ship faded into the night sky. The much anticipated and planned for first test flight to India, the great airship R101, the dream of so many, was underway.