Episode 330: His Majesty’s Airship

Hello, at 2:09 in the morning on October 5th, 1930, the British airship R-101 crashed some 90 miles northwest of Paris. It was just a few hours into a journey that was supposed to take it to Karachi, then a premier city of the British Empire of India. Impacting the ground at approximately 13 mph, the 5.5 million cubic feet of hydrogen gas that gave the airship its buoyancy immediately caught fire. Forty-eight of the fifty-four on board died, including Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, a Labour peer, and the Secretary of State for Air, who had staked his policy program on R101’s successful voyage. It was a greater loss of life than that suffered in the more notorious Hindenburg crash of 1937–but, incredibly enough, it was not the greatest number of lives to be claimed by an airship accident. And on that record of death and destruction–and why it was tolerated for so long–hangs a tangled story.

The story of how R101 came to its rapid end is told by S.C. Gwynne in his new book His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine. S.C. Gwynne has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon.

For Further Investigation

Some of themes in the conversation were touched in earlier conversations: one with Tom Misa, on the history of technology, and the other with Iwan Rhys Morus on how Victorians conceived of the future.
Harold G. Dick and Douglas H. Robinson, The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships: Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg
E. A. Johnston, Airship Navigator: One Man’s Part in the British Airship Tragedy 1916-1930
Nick Le Neve Walmsley, R101: A Pictorial History
Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: An Autobiography
Thomas Paone, "Before Top Gun, Hollywood Promoted Naval Aviation with Dirigible"