Daydream Notes

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...

R 100's control car. While the story of how the Imperial Airship Scheme got to the end of 1929 took lots of words, summarizing our story is very simple. The British wanted to build a fleet of passenger airships, to serve the British Empire. Due to political shenanigans, the development of these airships was turned into a competition between the government backed Royal Airship Works (RAW), and private industry in the form of Vickers.  Each set out to build an airship, and whoever built the best airship would win the contract for the rest of the airship fleet. The RAW airship was the R101, and it was very ambitious, looking to pioneer new technology whenever possible; in contrast, the R100 was built on a very cost conscious budget, and used existing technology whenever possible. By the end of 1929, both airships had started flight testing, with the R101 having racked up more than 70 hours. The results of R101's flight testing were disquieting, to say the least: the governmen...

Last time on "posts as big as airships" we read the background for a fantastic engineering competition, where private industry and the British Government would try to build the best airship, and the winner would get a nice fat contract to build four more airships to create a unique skyship airway system to connect the British Empire. We also met the R100, the scrappy underdog of the competition. Somehow, Vickers took a leaky hanger you could hide a cathedral in, some aluminum sheet, some Yorkshire farmers and almost no machines, and managed to construct a seven hundred foot airship that worked. The overdog when this project started was the R101. The men of the Royal Airship Works (RAW) had it all - a blank check and the overt support of their government in this competition, and the engineers of the Airship works saw the R101 as England's big chance to take the lead in LTA technology. The R101 flew before the R100, and did a minimal amount of flight testi...