Daydream Notes

A kind reader tipped me off that there was something screwed up with link navigation in the R100/R101 posts. I'm not sure what exactly the problem was (blogspot upgraded to https while I writing the series, and the resulting technical twitches might've borked the links) but something was up. One of the chapters vanished from the sidebar as well. Anyway, I've gone through and fixed the links at the bottom of the page, and you can now find everything on the sidebar again. The metatags work as well if you are looking for different chapters. If you spot anything else wrong, please don't hesitate to comment/drop me a note. Oh, and I'm nearly done not one, but two new aeronautical nerd-posts on two different subjects. If you read that and ask "why didn't you finish one so we could read that while you did another", well, see above.

The R101 project was in a bad way. The effort by the Royal Airship Works to construct an airliner had been troubled since R101's first flight the previous October. Now that her rival, the R100, had made a successful demonstration flight to Canada, it was impossible for R101 to do anything but attempt a similar flight. She was not ready for this. She had never been flight tested properly, both in the practical sense and in the sense she had not met various government requirements to be considered safe for such a flight. She was also not ready in that when R100 returned from Canada, R101 was in a shed in Cardington undergoing extensive refit. In order to give R101 the useful lift she would need to even fly in the tropics, she was being extended and given a 500,000 cubic foot lifting cell. She was also have most of her outer cover replaced, and her lifting cells replaced, and this work had to happen at a grueling schedule thanks to political pressure. The Labor government of ...

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...