The Story of the R100 and R101 IV: A Big Day Out

R100 at Cardington.

 When we last saw R100, she was at the docking mast at Cardington, getting ready for her flight to Canada. This post is all about that trip - though it also is about what the Imperial Airship service might have been like, had it been established.

R100 was supposed to have taken the trip to the Dominion of Canada as early as May, but minor problems managed to delay the flight to the end of July 1930. So when the chance actually came, the men of the R100 program were chomping at the bit to get going. Having flown an extensive series of flight tests (at least compared to R101), and with all systems working in harmony, departing to Canada was simply a matter of loading enough fuel, in this case, 34.5 tons of gasoline.The Captain for the flight was to be Squadron Commander Booth, and Caption George Meager, one of our narrators, to be first mate. The flight crew for R100's trans-Atlantic trip was its usual crew: a roughly proportional  mixture of Navy LTA flyers (like Capt.Meager), British Private School lads (who'd used their connections to get a job on what all the newspapers were talking about) and working-class riggers and other men recruited during construction. Despite the odd mix, this crew by all accounts worked brilliantly together, complementing each other's strengths, and having the operational, theoretical, and practical knowledge needed to run a rigid airship. Despite Booth being the captain, Major Scott was actually making lots of flying decisions and could be considered R100's commander. (Major Scott, let's not forget, was the captain of the R38's trans-Atlantic flight, so there was some justification for this slightly awkward command arrangement.)

Nevielle Shute was coming along, as was his boss, Sir Denison Burney. The other passengers were representatives of the RAF (Sq. Leader Wann) the Royal Navy (Lt. Cmdr. Prentice) and people from RAW: Wing Commander Colmore and two assistants of his, one of these being the Mr. McWade that tried his best to sound the alarm on the R101's flaws.

While R100 is being loaded, it's worthwhile to stop a moment and talk about the state of trans-Atlantic air travel. Charles Lindbergh's historic solo flight to Paris happened only three years previous, and Amelia Earhart became a celebrity like Lindbergh in 1928 by being the first woman on a trans-Atlantic flight, and she was a passenger. (Earhart felt her fame undeserved for this, and would go on to perform many aviation exploits of her own.) 1929 saw 13 attempts to cross the Atlantic by flying, and eight of those failed, with two more attempts just vanishing over the ocean. In contrast, rigid airships had a 100% success rate on trans-Atlantic flights, with the first commercial trans-Atlantic flight happening in 1928 by Graf Zeppelin. The 1930 trans-Atlantic season had gotten off to a promising start in May: taking the shorter south Atlantic route, Jean Mermoz for Aéropostale flew a Latecoere 28 floatplane from Dakar to Natal, the first airplane trans-Atlantic mail service. That May also saw another successful crossing by Graf Zeppelin. The Southern Cross, a Fokker F.VII that was the first aircraft to fly the Pacific, flew from Dublin to Harbor Grace, Newfoundland. And two British flyers in a De Haviland Puss Moth crashed on takeoff in Harbor Grace, trying to fly to Britain.

All this is me repeating myself, I know, but it is worth emphasizing that despite typical British understatement, the flight of the R100 was in fact a pretty big deal in 1930. Especially as this flight was bringing along cooks, stewards, and hot breakfasts every morning.

R100's salon, with Neville Norway (Shute) on the stairway.

The upstairs, where additional passenger cabins were.

The cabins themselves were spartan - the window looks out onto the promenade, not outside.

Cardington, UK to St. Hubert, DoC; Direct; Cabin & Meals INCLUDED

Cast off for the R100 was the 29th of July 1930, at three am. Despite the dead of night departure time, hundreds of people stayed up to see R100 depart, and honked the horns of their cars when R100 fired up her engines and departed the mast. Flying between 1000 and 1500 ft, R100 first flew north-west, to get around a depression near Ireland. This route took R100 directly over Liverpool, where every ship in the harbor blew their horn as she passed overhead in the dawn sky.  R100 actually had her own meteorologist on board to interpret data being sent by the Air Ministry; by noon R100 was north of the depression and had a tail wind to take her across the ocean.

Shute went to bed after takeoff and got up around 8 am. He might have breakfasted with Meager, who was coming off watch. Meager tells us that breakfast was "Fried eggs and bacon with hot buttered toast, marmalade and fresh coffee."  Meager then does his inspection, including a long, long walk out on deck to inspect the 'tops', as it were. While making an inspection of the tail, Meager got caught in a sudden downpour that turned to hail. When Meager made it back to the control gondola to report, everyone is surprised by his wetness, as they were barely aware it was raining. R100 skims the coast of Ireland until her turn west, and then goes on three engines. With the tailwind, her speed is 60 knots, or nearly 70 mph. Lunch was served at 1:30, which was soup, stewed beef, peas and potatoes, with greengages and custard for dessert. Beer, tea and coffee to drink. As this was settling, Shute observed the unsettled, choppy Atlantic from the Promenade, and thought it looked very desolate. "It beats us all how anyone should have the courage to attempt the Atlantic in an aeroplane" he tells his diary.

The gramophone plays in the afternoon; because the engines are physically so far away from the passenger area, its music is easy to hear everywhere.  The walls of the cabins were also fabric, so hopefully the person in the next room doesn't snore. Cards are a popular activity among the passengers, as is pumping gasoline. To get petrol from the main tanks to the tanks the engines used, it had to be manually pumped there, and there was no shortage of volunteers among the passengers. (I think this speaks to time passing a mite slowly.)  Drift over the ocean is measured by dust-bomb by day, and calcium flare at night. The dust-bomb (a small box filled with aluminum power) is dropped, and the cloud of dust that results is a good mark for R100 to check her drift and the wind speed. Four PM, the all important tea time, and you can have your tea while taking in the rain, mist, icebergs, and general desolate emptiness of the North Atlantic.  Additional navigation fixes are provided by wireless contact with passing ships. If two fixes can be done in a short time, it provides a way to triangulate R100's position. A game is invented that will last the rest of R100's journey, where passengers and crew take bets on the exact distance traveled from noon observation to noon observation.

The control car was directly below the Promenade windows. A man is climbing out of the engine car on the left.

The next day, the 30th of July, is more of the same, though Shute give a quote in his diary that frequently appears in the story of the R100. "The comfort of this flight is almost staggering. Sleep all night in bed, get up, shave in hot water, dress and eat a normal breakfast served in a Christian way. If this water collector can be developed, as I think it can, we may be able to have baths in future ships." From the point of view of comfort, at least, the R100 is a success - though in a slight negative mark, the flight has already ran out of beer.  A low pressure area around Hudson's Bay is creating a headwind, and now all six engines are being used. Belle Isle is seen through the mist (an island just north of Newfoundland's most northerly point) at nightfall. The R100 takes the straight of Belle Isle (the channel between Newfoundland and Quebec) into the gulf of St. Lawrence, hugging Quebec's north shore. Once the St. Lawrence is found, the river can can be followed right to Montreal. Meager is not much impressed with the north shore of Quebec, as it "seems to consist almost entirely of forest, inter-spaced with numerous lakes."

Lifting cells 7 and 8, giving about 15 tons of lift, seem to be leaking, and now an attempt is made to mend any holes. Cox'n Hobbs leads a party of men along the radial wires in between the lifting cells, and several 8 cm holes are mended along a radial wire chafing the lifting cell. These sorts of repairs pose a tricky problem to the men of the gas bags: how to know when lifting gas is about? This is important, not only as a sign of a gas bag leaking, but also to know when you might be in danger of passing out and falling. (A match is obviously out.) The answer is singing, talking, or whistling while on "the gas level." The lifting gas will change your pitch if you encounter a cloud. (Meager says hydrogen gas does have a sort-of odor, giving the air a particular metallic tang to it, and well, he would know.)

At three PM on August 1st, approximately 80 km (50 miles) from Quebec City, the Montreal RCMP radio the R100 and ask their ETA to Montreal. In an attempt to make it to Montreal by nightfall, Major Scott directs Captain Booth to step on it, and speed increases to 70 knots. Shortly after, mountains on Quebec's north shore add some excitement: cold air rolling off the mountains into the gulf creates quite a lot of turbulence. The formerly serene R100 gets all sorts of pitching, yawing, and rolling motions, and R100 steers south away from shore. Once the turbulence stopped, men in the port and starboard engine cars ring the bridge: they can see rips in the rear fins.

R100 over the Gulf of St.Lawrence.

Meager, Shute, and a team of riggers are dispatched to the stern, and speed is reduced to about 30 km/h. Some tape has come away, making twin 3 ft slits on the leading edge of the lower fin. This was mild enough, though unless mended, the rips would spread. While Meager went to get more riggers, Shute examined a large hole in the cover made in under the keel, and pulled the loose cover inboard, to stop it from flapping until riggers came along to start mending. Meager and Shute then split up, with Shute next examining the port fin while Meager went to the starboard and top fins. (One advantage of fin's hollow structure is that in daylight, tears could be see very easily from inside.) Shute found a hole in the lower port fin "large enough to drive a bus through" about 15 ft long. The holding tapes were, ah, holding, but the fabric itself was in tatters and beating quite badly. The starboard and top fins had minor damage like the bottom one, so after the riggers had used needle, thread, and regulation dope to mend the small holes, all effort was concentrated on the port-side fin. Fortunately, a Cox'n had stashed a roll of cotton fabric instead of ditching it for the Canada flight, and this was taken up to the hole. By Shute's account, up to 15 men were out on the portside fin, 1500 ft above the St. Lawrence. The dicey job was inside the fin; unless they were within reach of the leading fin edge or main structural spar, riggers had walk tightrope style on the lower structural wires, while bracing themselves via the upper structural wires. Meager says the men simply hitched a rope to themselves and to the nearest structural bit, while Shute said the men had safety belts for this sort of nearly-aerobatic work, which they "sometimes" attached to nearby spars and wires.  In fact, at one point Meager had to tell Cox'n Hobbs to put a rope on, and received of a covert look of disgust from the Cox'n. Clearly for the riggers, this was all in a day's work. Later SC Booth came up to observe the repairs, and found another rigger taking a short rest: he'd made a hammock out of a square of upper canvas still properly lashed - with nothing but wire and air below. 

It was a rough and ready repair - the big roll of cotton fabric lashed to the lower fin via rope - but these were (mostly) Navy men, with a good understanding on how to lash things.The total repair time was two hours.

At 6 PM, R100 flew past Quebec City, with the bridge that spans the St. Lawrence crowded with people. The delay while R100 fixed her fins now set her ETA for Montreal to midnight. As it happens, another event was to delay R100.

R100 over Quebec City.

7:30 was supper time, and at 7:20 Burney, Shute, Major Scott, and Captian Booth were having a aperitief in the form of sherry. Captain Meager was on watch in the control car, looking forward to dinner. R100 was passing Trois Rivieres when R100 flew into the squall line of an approaching thunderstorm. (Major Scott had told Capt. Booth to fly on through it, despite the just repaired damage. Evidently, he was the sort of man who would press on when more cautious men might have went around.) R100 plows into the storm's updraft, going from 1200 to 3000 ft in about a minute. The crew angles the nose down as far as possible, but this just means the airship is now climbing while at a nose down angle of 35 degrees. Dinner, set up on a table in the salon, was flung forward, with toast being observed as far as the second structural ring. Similarly, in the kitchen, all crockery, silverware, and the big tureen of soup the chef had just finished making went on the floor. The climb ends at 5000 ft, where R100 meets torrential rain. All this action is made somewhat more complected by a barrel in the radio room tipping over, and a great deal of red aircraft dope leaking out. Meager, directly below in the midst of everything else found a red substance dripping into the control car. Major Scott cut the power to the airship's lights (the dope was flammable) and it was ten minutes before the dope had been sufficiently cleaned up for them to go back on.

Meager then checked the tail for damage. The afternoon's fix was just fine, but now the starboard lower fin had torn itself, with two 20 foot rents running along two structural wires. Speed was reduced (and further thunderstorms were gone around instead of through) as Meager, without dinner, lead a gang of riggers in the fixing of these latest tears before they could develop into another hole. This repair session required much less high-wire work from the riggers, but by now, the sun had gone down, so everything had to be illuminated by flashlight. By midnight, the repairs are done, and the giant illuminated cross at the top of Mt. Royal in Montreal can be seen. The illuminated cross was the rather surreal end to the most eventful day of the Big Trip Out. R100 spends the rest of the night meandering about, staying out of the way of small thunderstorms passing by. As dawn breaks, R100 steers for St. Hubert, and her docking tower.

 By 5:37 AM Montreal time the call "ship secure" means that R100 has docked. The total flight time was 78 hours 49 minutes, and the distance covered was 3,364 nautical miles - (6,230 km, 3871 statue miles.) By train and ship, this trip would have taken twice the amount of time.

Sunny Days in Canada

For the full effect, here's a newsreel of R100 docking.

St. Hubert was Canada's first international airport, and Canada had actually studied the problems (IE staggeringly vast crowds) that an airship arrival can bring, having examined at some length the previous visits of Graf Zeppelin to the United States. They've made provisions for toilets, concessions, RCMP to control crowds, and even ran a branch railway line from the station in Montreal to St. Hubert. All these things are well considered, as even as R100 is docking, her crew observes the nearby roads jammed with people and vehicles. Some 10,000 people were there to greet R100's crew when they disembarked, and over a million people would make the trip to see R100 at her tower. The RCMP (dressed naturally in their dress reds and broad-brimmed hats) managed the people going into and out of the mooring mast itself, while the Royal Canadian Dragoons of the Canadian Army managed what would now be called site security. Tours of the R100 were obviously a hot ticket.

It goes without saying the crew and especially the heads of the R100 enterprise gave lots of interviews, and were given all sorts of Dinners (note the capital letter) by which various groups of Canadians basically said "We're glad you are here." About the only interesting thing to come out of the media press (har har) was that in the Imperial airship scheme saw the future of the program as flying very long distances, almost always over water. This may seem like a weird limit to put on a machine that flies, but it made sense. Difficult flying conditions for rigid airships are not in the cold, or over the water, but hot areas over land. As the pioneering long distance flight of L 59 demonstrated, such areas pose challenges to your average Zeppelin flight. First, hot air is less dense than cold air, so it lifts less. Second, the greater extremes of temperature makes keeping the ballast in trim much more difficult. Mountains especially are tricky: as sometimes the temperature of air varies greatly from one side to the other. A perfectly trimmed and balanced airship can fly over mountains and go instantly out of balance, being either much too heavy or much too light. Oceans, in contrast, have a moderated temperature and (note to self: check this later) not much in the way of elevation. So if you had an airship that, say, was very heavy and had trouble flying anyway, restricting her to mostly ocean flights was probably for the best.

Of course it makes the remarks of a certain Sterling Archer sting all the more.

Obviously a lot of talk during R100's Montreal stay and after involved the future of airships. While the Air Ministry and RAW were very focused on communication lines and especially flights to India, Sir Burney had a different view. He saw British airships competing with German airships for the prize of trans-Atlantic air traffic, especially with America. He had also, despite his status as instigator of the whole program, some doubts about the ability of airships to be commercially viable - by his reckoning only the very longest trans-Pacific routes would be able to be profitable, where the time-saving advantage was at its greatest. He also explictly ruled out North American transcontinental flights: while American airships could fly over the Rockies, apparently the British designs couldn't handle the altitude.

Our correspondents spent some time mending small things that went wrong, including another rip in the hydrogen cells. Shute visited the Vickers works in Montreal, and got several rolls of airship grade material for the flight back. Capt. Meager had a rougher time of it: Major Scott asked him to examine the areas around the upper ventilators (vents to allow the escape of gas at the top of the airship) for rot, and he found quite a bit of it in the cords that held the lifting cells to the frame. (Water was getting in via the vents.)  He and Cox'in Hobbs had to climb up into the gridwork to the top of the airship and made repairs, all while it was fine summer weather. The ambient air was 30 degrees C, so god only know how hot it was up in the frame. Meager reports getting back to the inhabited parts of the airship with his overalls literally soaked with sweat. At least there was a steward on hand with cool lemonade.

R100 also did a "local flight": both to give the press and VIPs an actual airship ride, and to show off the R100 via an overflight of Ontario down to Niagara falls. This happened near the end of R100's Canadian vacation, as it allowed to test that the cover fixes had stuck.

Visitors during the Ontario flight getting their look on.

Despite the name, the local flight took 26 hours and covered 1600 km (1000 miles.) It's also the only time R100 flew with a full load of passengers. Neville Shute gave the flight a pass to let other people ride. R100 got underway on the tenth of August, at six in the evening. By ten PM R100 was circling a moonlit Ottawa. At around midnight, R100 set course for Lake Ontario, passing over Peterborough and Kingston. They reached Toronto at the ungodly hour of 4:45 AM, and thus set course for Niagara falls instead. This was achieved by sunrise, and in fine clear weather, so all could make out the waterfall waterfallin'. R100 then turned back to Toronto and gave it a proper overflight, with the entire city stopping to see the passing airship. R100 then set course along Lake Ontario and down the St. Lawrence to Montreal, arriving about noon, but then had to cruise around St. Hubert as another heard of thunderstorms were grazing in the Montreal area. Somewhere around here two engines had mechanical trouble. One ate its reduction gear, and another had magneto trouble, which threw off the engine timing.

Toronto from the air, 1930.

R100 over the new Toronto-Dominion bank, under construction.

Once docked, R100's technical staff got on the problems. The magneto was easily fixed, but the reduction gear was much more intractable. R100 engineers had anticipated the need for engine maintenance "at the mast", and apparently had a gantry for changing engines. (I'd love to know if this gantry somehow hooked onto R100 to winch the engines 200 feet to the ground, but details are scarce.)  But, annoyingly, the gantry was at Cardington, and there were no spare engines. So R100 was going back across the Atlantic on 5. Upon leaving, WC Colmore said he hoped that R100 would be back before this time next year.

Camping Trip in the Sky

So the intrepid travelers got back in R100, and set a course down the St. Lawrence to the ocean. R100 released the docking mast on the 13th of August at 9:30 PM, to the cheers of thousands who had come to St. Hubert to see her off. R100 carried more passengers on the return trip, four reporters from Canada, and four reporters from the major wire services and Britain newspapers. Also, at the request of the Canadian Prime Minister, R.B. Bennett, a M. Jacques Cartier, a descendant of the famous explorer (and a Montreal journalist) was along for the ride. Canada sent along Group Captian EW Steadman, the RCAF's chief aeronautical engineer. The Air Ministry in addition to picking the aforementioned reporters, (and British name fanciers take note) picked Wing Commander L.J.E Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the British air attache in Washington, for an airship ride. Letters to the British Prime Minister, the Secretary of the Air, and to the Lord Mayor of London, as well as a box of cut flowers for the Queen and three crates of fresh-picked Ontario Peaches - two for the R100 crew, and one for the Prince of Wales were also onboard.


The trip down the St. Lawrence was easier than the trip in, as R100 made 80 mph on only 5 engines. As soon as R100 was under way, the off-duty crew started playing jazz records that they had bought in Montreal. Retracing her inbound route, R100 once again went up the St. Lawrence Strait, up Newfoundland's west coast, and across Belle Isle. (Newfoundland did not impress Captain Meager: "Newfoundland is one great mass of small lakes and forest, a most inhospitable looking place.") Beyond Belle Isle the wide Atlantic Ocean beckoned, with white icebergs looking like chunks of discarded marble. Fuel pumping was once again a popular activity among the passengers. The weather up until now had been clear and fine, but now showed signs of an approaching low pressure system. This was a surprise, as weather reports previously indicated plain sailing flying all across the Atlantic. It turns out the wireless operator was so busy sending copy dispatches for the press that he missed a interim weather report. This caused R100's meteorologist to yell at the wireless operator (and on an airship with cloth walls, everybody can hear it when people yell at you.) Dinner that night was soup, fish, vegetables, sweets, cheese, biscuits, fresh peaches and coffee, and the salon was decorated with fresh flowers. Post dinner, Major Scott and Squadron Leader Johnson (the head navigator) were interviewed by the Toronto Evening Telegram. Both were going to be on R101's big trip to India, and from a navigation and flying point of view, the trip would be far more difficult than the trip to Montreal was. While Johnson doesn't say the trip is impossible, he does seem to not looking forward to it.

The navigator's position at the nose for shooting the sun and stars.

 Later on there was a scary moment when the cabin lights all went out. You can forgive all the passengers if they thought for a moment they were all about to crash into the North Atlantic, but the engines made their reassuring hum, and their ears detected no pressure changes. After a few minutes, the lights came back on again. With a healthy tailwind, R100 was on three engines, which were rotated in operation every few hours. An engine had been rotated, but the crew had turned off the engine providing cabin power without realizing it, and had not flicked the switch to reconnect the cabin power to the freshly running engine. The Evening telegram reporter then got a tour of the working parts of the airship. The main gangway was somewhat dark, illuminated only occasionally by lights. The girders creaked in a ship-like way, as was the ship-like gurgle of water coming off the top of the ship to fill the ballast tanks. A heavy rain drummed the outer cover, and visibility declined to zero. Throughout the night, gale force winds and heavy rain were constants. R100 made only about 40 knots through the murk, even as five engines were brought online.

The outer cover, ever the trouble on R100, had one more trick to play. The constant rain found the leaky bits in the outer cover, and got inside R100. This was a problem, as R100 had cloth walls, which were soon soaked with rain. This rain also shorted out the cabin electrical system, which not only killed the lights but also the electrical cookers. By British standards, the flight had descended to barbarity, as it was no longer possible to make tea. Breakfast that day was sardines with bread and butter and lime juice, and lunch was supposed to have been beefsteak with vegetables, but instead was jellied chicken with salad, with lime juice or whiskey and soda. It was also fairly cold in the cabin, it being a rather damp 7 Degrees C. One hopes the journalists dressed warmly. As before, the guests stated taking bets on the noon to noon travel distance of R100, and the kitchen again ran out of beer.

Out of the depression, things started to warm up again, and hopefully the air at 2000 ft allowed the cabin to dry out. Meager had lost his cabin, having lent it to a reporter from The New York Times. He probably did better than most passengers - even in the spartan crew cabin, he had a sleeping bag of kapoc (an old material used to make WW2 era life jackets - I imagine it was heavy as hell), and a teddy bear suit to keep warm in. The only other notable thing to report was that for some reason somebody let one of the riggers pilot the ship (and having never done it before) he nearly crashed R100 into the Ocean. He thought he was keeping it level, but was slowly descending, the mistake only caught when R100 was at 500 ft.

R100 returned to the mast at Cardington without further incident. The end of the very impressive flight was somewhat anticlimanctic, as only the families of the crew and the British press turned out to meet R100. They docked 10:30 AM on the 16th Of August, 1930. It was the end of a very impressive journey: R100 had demonstrated a few problems, it was true, but for a experimental flight in an airliner across the risky North Atlantic, it was a smashing success.

The R100 engineers also had enough to make an assessment on work still to do. I imagine Nevielle Shute jotting down a list of things to do with R100:

TO DO:
1. Make aircraft waterproof
2. (See #1:) Redo outer cover as per Zeppelin method
3. Look into better cabin heating
4. One thing is clear: we need more beer (idea: substitute a ballast bag for beer bags?!) <---
5. Don't let engine switching kill the cabin power and thus cause passengers to think they are about  to die

The Lifting Cells, too, would need to be replaced: using the current "animal intestines and cotton" method, the cells had a useful service life of about a year, and R100's cells had been filled nearly that long. Total price: 100,000 pounds. Shute returned to work on a fore-and-aft docking mast method to make bringing the giant airships in and out of hangers much easier and less dependent on perfectly calm weather: a necessity for real scheduled service.The next day, R100 was walked into her hanger at Cardington, where she was deflated and hung up. Nobody guessed at the time that R100's trail-blazing flight would in fact be the last flight of the giant airship. R100 returned to Cardington when every ounce of effort had to be directed toward refurbishing R101. The Air Ministry would not hear of any work being done on the R100 until R101 was safely out and back again.

Next time, we return to the R101. Somewhat amazingly even the success of R100 would have a negative effect on the R101 project. I've spent some time already commenting that in the Air Ministry, there seems to have been a lack of technical literacy among the bureaucrats. Well, these bureaucrats (especially the Air Minister Lord Thomson) saw R100's successful flight as evidence that R101 was capable of making a long distance flight too, despite the very different designs of the two respective airships. Or perhaps the R101 had politically to make a long distance flight, now that her rival had successfully made one. It's difficult to say, but for whatever reason, the R101 had a very firm date for her trip to India, and the Air Minister had had enough of the delays. I mean, the R100 came though alright, what could possibly go wrong?

Next: What, indeed?

Part of the a series of posts on the Imperial Airships.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 5