R-101 Sequelae

Funeral. Through the stifled silence of a million watchers, 48 British army wagons carried the 48 dead of the R-101 crash through London streets last week. Prime Minister MacDonald watched from Westminster Hall, grieving for his good friend and cabinet colleague, Air Secretary Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson.

A train carried the bodies from London to near Cardington, where a great pit had been prepared. While bombers circled, Royal Air Force men carried the coffins down a ramp, laid them in orderly rows, twelve coffins to a row.

A stocky man in a blue coat and peaked cap was in the funeral cortege--Dr. Hugo Eckener. He related a meteorological phenomenon of the disaster night which might account for the R-101 flying close to the ground. As the Graf Zeppelin landed from a flight that same night, barometric pressure fell so suddenly that the Graf Zeppelin's altimeter (on the ground) indicated that she was still 400 ft. in the air. The R-101's navigator might have believed himself 400 ft. higher than he actually was.

Precedent. Historians dug up and air-minded editors circulated the fact that, just 100 years before the R-101's tragedy, on Sept. 15, 1830, an ex-cabinet minister died at the inauguration of a then new-fangled mode of transportation: William Huskisson, the Duke of Wellington's Secretary of Colonies, bumped by the locomotive at the opening of one of Britain's first railroads (Liverpool & Manchester). Loud was the outcry then against "dangerous" railroads.

Helium. The explosion of the 5,500,000 cu. ft. of hydrogen inflating the R-101 caused practically all the devastation. Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett of the U. S. Navy last week pointed out that if non-inflammable helium (gas next lightest to hydrogen) had been used the R-101 would not have exploded. British commentators had already noted this obvious fact, with the implication that the U. S., monopolist of the world's helium supply, had selfishly prevented any of the gas from being exported. President Hoover deemed this insinuation worthy of White House denial. The Department of Commerce revealed that it has only once refused permission for the exportation of . helium. That was because of insufficient information as to the shipment's destination and use. Nine other shipments have been permitted, no others, requested.

Los Angeles. At Akron, Ohio, last week, Goodyear-Zeppelin Co. was about half through with the first of the two new dirigibles planned for the U. S. Navy. Under the contract, the Secretary of the Navy may yet cancel construction of the second ship. But that is unlikely, because the navy needs at least two vessels of any new sort to conduct experiments. Now its only rigid airship is the Los Angeles, built by the Germans. (Of the 115 German rigid airships built up to and through the War, not one was wrecked by structural defects.) When Germany delivered the Los Angeles to the U. S. six years ago, the Zeppelin works said she would last three years. Last week a Navy inspection board said she was good for two years more.

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