Slide Rule (14 page)

This modification kept R.100 in her shed for a month or so, and in the meantime R.101 came out to the mooring mast for further trials. It had been realised before Christmas that the small disposable load of R.101 would make a flight to India impossible because she couldn’t carry enough fuel, and a programme had been put in hand to try to put her right. All unnecessary equipment, including the useless servo motors, was taken out of her, her gasbag wiring was let out to increase her gas volume, and—last resort of desperate engineers—she was to be parted in the middle and an extra parallel portion inserted in her length, containing an extra gasbag. These alterations finally brought her disposable load up to 49.3 tons, still five tons less than that of R.100. In fairness, however, it must be realised that her diesel engines used less fuel than ours, so that in the end there might not have been much to choose between the ships in regard to range and load-carrying capacity.

It was impossible to insert the extra bay in R.101 at once, and when she came out to the mast for further trials in June the ship had been gutted of all superfluous equipment
and the gasbags had been let out. Immediately she was put on to the mast, in a very light wind, the outer cover split longitudinally, making a tear a hundred and forty feet long. The wind was rising so she could not be put back in the shed, and the riggers mended it at the mast. A second, shorter split occurred next day, and was mended. They reinforced the cover with tapes stuck on inside with dope, and made a short test flight. They then made two more flights in daylight on consecutive days, each lasting for about twelve hours; these were less for technical reasons than to show the ship at the rehearsal for the R.A.F. display at Hendon, and at the display itself. Publicity was important to them. They did no full power trial, probably because they were afraid of the outer cover.

During these two flights R.101 grew steadily heavier, due to loss of gas; from the addition of the water ballast dropped and the fuel consumed she seemed to be losing lift at the rate of nearly a ton an hour. At the time it was thought by the captain of the ship that this was due to the over-sensitive gas valves chattering on their seatings, but more probably it was due to the chafing of the gasbags against the girders of the ship since the wiring had been let out to increase the volume, which had resulted in many holes.

Some correspondence, revealed at the accident enquiry, took place in the Air Ministry about these gas leaks. The inspector of the Aircraft Inspection Department, whose duty was to ensure the airworthiness of the ship so far as her construction was concerned, put in a written report upon these leaks, finishing up, “Until this matter is seriously taken in hand and remedied I cannot recommend to you the extension of the present ‘Permit to fly’ or the issue of any further permit or certificate.” Nobody at the Air Ministry knew much about airships, and this criticism was forwarded to Cardington for comment. The
designers of the ship were thus being asked to adjudicate upon the soundness of their own work, being asked to decide if their ship was safe or not. Their credit, in comparison with ourselves, was at stake now. The palisade was hard around them, forcing them along a road that they never would have taken had they been free men. To put it in another way, if R.100 had had gas leaks of that magnitude they would have declared her un-airworthy at once, and rightly so.

They replied, in effect, that gasbags in airships always had touched the girders, and that a little padding of the girders was an effective cure. They probably indicated unofficially that they thought the inspector was an old woman making a mountain out of a molehill. The tone of the official correspondence supports that view.

So R.101 was put back in to her shed. She was parted in the middle and the new bay was inserted; she was fitted with two new engines capable of reversing by an adjustment to the camshaft, the many points where the gasbags were bearing heavily against the girders were padded, and most of her outer cover was renewed.

It was stipulated in the contract for R.100 that the ship must demonstrate her ability to carry out inter-continental flights by a flight to Canada. I do not think that this requirement was exactly a contractual liability, because to the best of my recollection our expenditure upon the ship ceased when she was handed over to the Air Ministry at the conclusion of the English trials. But the requirement had been written in to the contract six years before, in 1924, and up till June 1930 it had never been questioned. R.100 was to go to Canada and R.101 to India, as soon as the English trials were over.

The Cardington engineers, after the June trials of R.101, began to put forward tentative and unofficial proposals for a postponement of these long flights to the following year.
They said that the two airships were in an early stage of development and that neither ship was fit to make a long flight at that stage. A disaster might set back the whole cause of airships in England, and it would be a pity to run any risk for the sake of getting on quickly; development would go better if we did not hurry it. They suggested, through unofficial intermediaries, that both staffs should take that line, and jointly ask for a postponement of these long flights.

Perhaps if we had realised at the time how very, very bad their ship was, how real the danger of complete disaster if they started for India, we might have taken a different attitude to this approach. Their own secrecies concealed the real facts from us; we guessed that their ship was a bad airship, but we did not know the whole story. We brushed aside this approach, perhaps roughly. We said that our ship was perfectly capable of flying to Canada; the Canadian flight was a part of our contract and it was necessary for us to do it. Again, the bitter competition between the staffs loomed large. A heavy loss had been made upon the construction of R.100. If this was to be recouped from future airship contracts, ours must be the organisation to carry on the work and they must give up. We would complete our contract and prove the efficiency of R.100 by flying to Canada; they could please themselves whether they flew to India or not. With that perhaps we drove the final stake into the palisade around them, blocking their one way out.

It must have been about this time that a very distinguished scientist visited Cardington to see R.101. He was, of course, completely ignorant of airships and R.101 was very big and very well finished, altogether a magnificent-looking piece of engineering. He was shown over the ship by her chief designer, who later was to lose his life in her, and at the conclusion of the visit the scientist was full of
praise for what he considered to be a wonderful achievement. He said that the designer must be a very proud man.

The chief designer answered, “I suppose it ought to be a great satisfaction, but somehow I feel too tired.”

FROM THAT TIME ON the atmosphere at Cardington became very bad, certainly so far as we were concerned. Arrangements were being made for the flight of R.100 to Canada with very bad grace. For some technical reason I had to go to Cardington about the middle of July; I flew down in a club Moth piloting myself, and landed it just outside the airship hangars. This method of travelling in summer weather saved several hours of driving time and much fatigue, but it might have been better if I had gone down by car because any suggestion that we knew more about the air than they did probably rasped sore nerves, and none of them could fly an aeroplane. My technical business involved a conference with the chief members of their organisation, all but one of whom were later to lose their lives; they were quite polite, but nobody invited me to lunch in their mess room although our business was to extend into the afternoon, and I would have gone without lunch altogether if the captain of R.100, distressed by this incivility, had not taken me to his home. When our conference was over the officers and crew of R.100 came to help me start my little aeroplane and see me safely off the premises, but nobody else came. Perhaps they were all watching from their office windows, hoping I would crash.

Towards the end of July R.100 was brought out to the mast again and we made another flight in her of twenty-four hours duration. Technically this flight was completely uneventful. One incident perhaps deserves a
record. In the dark night, out somewhere over the Atlantic near the Scilly Isles, we asked for our position by wireless. Perhaps the two direction-finding stations were nearly in a line with us, making a bad cut, perhaps they were merely sleepy. They replied with creditable promptitude that our position was two miles south west of Guildford. Major Scott made a signal in reply: “Many thanks for position; sea very rough at Guildford.” Politeness invariably pays.

This was the seventh flight that R.100 made, and the last before she crossed the Atlantic. There were no troubles to be rectified, and little to be done before we started off except to put more fuel on board. We returned from this flight on Saturday. On the following Tuesday morning we set off for Montreal.

Looking back upon those days, I have sometimes wondered if we were very rash in taking the Atlantic flight so early in the ship’s career. On the whole I do not think we were. R.100 had made only seven flights before we started for Canada, but in those flights she had flown over a hundred and fifty hours and had covered seven or eight thousand miles. She had repeatedly been flown at full speed, and she had flown for long periods in very bad weather. We had no reason to anticipate any trouble with the engines, as these were of a well proved aeroplane type.

At the same time, there is no doubt that our Atlantic crossing was dictated by political motives alone, as in the case of the Indian flight of R.101. It is doubtful if any responsible technician would assert that a large and totally experimental aircraft is fit to cross the Atlantic on its eighth flight; the most that he could say would be, as I said, that he knew of nothing that would prevent it doing so in safety. This guarded approval of the project was all that could fairly be given at that stage. In that respect our position was precisely similar to that of the designers of
the R.101, except that we had more flight experience behind us, and a better ship. Considered purely from the technical aspect, it was not very prudent for either airship to attempt a long flight at that stage of development. We did it, and got away with it.

Whenever I make a lengthy or an interesting journey I usually keep a diary, and my diary tells me that I spent the Sunday on the ship with the crew, making a very comprehensive inspection. One of our many petrol tanks was leaking a little, and we changed it for a new one. I went to London about midday on Monday, buying an overall and rubber shoes on the way, and reported to Burney that we were ready to start. That evening, at my club in Pall Mall, telephone calls confirmed the start for 3.30 the next morning. So I stood myself a very good and expensive dinner, followed by a glass of brandy and a cigar, read a novel by A. P. Herbert for a couple of hours to my great content, went to Burney’s house with my linen kitbag, and drove with him to Cardington in the middle of the night. On this flight Sir Dennis Burney and I represented the constructors, and a Lieut.-Cdr. Prentice represented the Admiralty; three members of the Cardington party travelled with us, and a representative of the Aircraft Inspection Department.

The diary, written during the flight, may tell most of the story from now onwards. For July 29th 1930:

We had a very expert meteorologist on board, who later was to lose his life in R.101, and every six hours we took a radio signal consisting of a great number of code groups sent out specially by the Air Ministry for us; from this we made up a fresh isobaric weather plot. An airship is so slow that one never butts into a head wind if it can possibly be avoided, and we altered course repeatedly to go the right way round the depressions and find a favouring wind. That morning we went north-west till we were off the west coast of Scotland and north of Ireland; we then turned westwards and found a beam wind, as forecast. I slept till about 8 a.m., and then breakfasted. Petrol was pumped manually to the gravity tanks above the power cars in R.100, and we all assisted the crew in this monotonous chore; for the rest, I roamed the ship as usual, looking for trouble.

In R.100 the passenger coach was within the hull about one third of the ship’s length from the bow; large windows in the outer cover permitted quite a good view from the passengers’ promenade decks. The control car was immediately beneath the passenger coach, outside the contour of the hull. All three power cars were aft of that, the nearest being about 120 feet aft. The passenger coach and the control car were therefore practically noiseless, and the gramophone was heard as clearly as in a house on land. The walls dividing the cabins were of fabric, so that a man snoring in the next cabin could be a real nuisance at night; so quiet was the ship.