Patched Shoe

Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, Secretary of State for the British Air Ministry, lately wrote: "Another disaster like that which befell the Shenandoah, would delay development for many years." He had ridden on the Shenandoah just before an Ohio thunderstorm tossed, twisted and tore her to disaster (TIME, Sept. 14,1925). Great Britain was then planning her R-100, which made a troubled round-trip between England and Canada this summer (TIME, Aug. 11), and her R-101. Lord Thomson had then commented: "If the best minds in England can devise anything to make dirigible flying absolutely safe, these ships will be so. Our experts are making exhaustive researches into disasters of the past to preclude repetitions."

Two and a half years ago Parliament, hoping that England would rule the winds as she ruled the waves, heard a Cassandra hoot: "The R-33 flew 800 hours and burst. The R-34, which flew across the Atlantic, afterward burst. The R-35 burst when inflated. The R-36 flew 397 hours and burst. The R-37 was never completed. The R-38 flew seventy hours and burst over Hull in August 1921, with a heavy loss of life. The R39 was unfinished. The R-40 flew seventy-three hours and burst." Those airships had cost England $12,000,000, had flown only 1,040 hr., at an approximate hourly cost of $7,500.

At Cardington. One evening last week the R-101 nuzzled her mooring mast, ready for her initial flight to India. She was a beautiful tuber, biggest thing of the air-- length 777 ft.; capacity 5,500,000 cu. ft.; lifting capacity 155 tons, five oil-driven motors.

There was a suppressed question as to her airworthiness. Last spring, to give her greater lifting power, she had been cut in two and a 45-ft. section inserted at the slice. A friend of Major G. H. Scott said he had made a remark "about a patched or mended shoe never being quite as sound as a new one." Was the new construction absolutely integral with the original? Might there be an uncalculated weakness at the middle? Might a gale buckle the R-101?

There was another question. The R-101 had a smoking room. It was well insulated from the inflammable hydrogen. So was the small amount of gasoline carried to start the oil motors. Was there any danger of explosion?

Lord Thomson answered all these questions with confident negatives last week. Calmly, with no fanfare he entered the moored R-101 at Cardington at misty twilight. With him were other British air notables--Sir William Sefton Brancker, Air Vice-Marshal and Director of Civil Aviation; Wing Commander R. B. B. Colmore, Director of the R-101'S construction; Lieut.-Col. V. C. Richmond, designer; Major G. H. Scott, Commander of the R34 (first dirigible to cross the Atlantic); and 49 other passengers, officers, crew.

At Friedrichshafen, Germany, Dr. Hugo Eckener was about to take his nomadic Graf Zeppelin on her regular weekly excursion across Germany.

The R-101 rose slowly, almost sluggishly, and headed south. She passed over London obscured by a light drizzle. The last that England saw of her red, white and green lights was over Hertfordshire about 9 p. m.

At Beauvais, French cathedral town, 49 mi. northwest of Paris, restive peasants heard a strumming through their night-shuttered windows. It was long after midnight. It was difficult to remove the shutters, for a hard rain storm, but one no harder than usual for the season, was blowing in from the Atlantic. When they could look abroad there, seemingly within reach of a man on earth, was the breath-taking silvery bulk of the R-101. She was lurching along, a gigantic stricken thing, 400 ft. from the ground.

Suddenly an explosion dulled the storm's roar. A halo of flame swelled through the raindrenched night. For an instant the watching peasants could discern the shine of the R-101'S length, could see her nose plunged into the wooded side of a low hill. There was a second, a third explosion, a titanic blaze.*

Villagers running toward the scene encountered eight reeling hysterical men who had struggled from the ship's infernal interior (one of the eight died later). Visible in the control cabin were wild faces./- The blaze was too fierce to approach.

In the morning, salvagers found the bodies, not one recognizable. Scrambled bones and a woman's slipper pointed to two stowaways, one perhaps an official's stenographer. Perhaps, however, a couple larking at the hill were caught under the wreck. The men who, against harsh opposition, had fought for a lighter-than-air program for the Empire were dead. Parts of the ship were scattered over five miles of terrain. The huge twisted skeleton was broken in half.

Which was cause and which effect--the bump into the hill, the explosion, the fracture of the hull? A loss of a rudder? These questions remained unanswerable last week. Incendiary smoking by one of the party seemed, however, out of the question. Discovery of a control fin some distance away from the wreck in the woods seemed to point to what precipitated the final plunge. British and French flying experts hastened to the scene, to answer the multitude of whys, then asked Dr. Eckener to help.

There was one very strange thing about this disaster. In similar dirigible wrecks, viz., those of the Shenandoah and the ZR2 (built by England, sold to the U. S.; destroyed over Hull, Eng., Aug. 1921), wind whirled the vessels high before their destruction. In the R-101'S case, the wind and rain seemed to have done the reverse, pressed the ship down to earth, buckled it from above.

* Superstitious Britons last week lamented that the R-101 had often been referred to in the press as "Titanic of the Air." The White Star Line's S. S. Titanic rammed an iceberg and sank with 1,513 souls on her maiden voyage in April 1912.

/- R-l0l's living quarters were completely built in, enveloped by the hull. The Los Angeles and Graf Zeppelin passenger cabins are suspended be neath the hull, behind the control cabin under the ship's nose.

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