In 2000, Marcia and
I visited the Aeronauticum Museum in Northern Germany. This was originally the
base from which German Zeppelin airships flew on bombing missions over London
& other cities in World War I.
Thanks to the
pioneering work of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Germany was far ahead of the
rest of the world in airship technology in those days, and after the war, they
began looking at airships as a means of luxury travel.
The British were not
to be outdone, however—they began building airships their own, “reverse-engineered”
from a Zeppelin that was shot down over Yorkshire in 1916. (All’s fair in
war—the “Red Baron’s” famous Fokker triplane was modelled after the British
Sopwith triplane in 1917.) The pride of Britain’s fledgling fleet was the
“R101.”
The giant airships
were regarded as the future of passenger transportation. From the point of view
of the citizens of the 1920s (whose milk was still being delivered in
horse-drawn wagons), a luxury liner that could fly serenely above the storm
clouds (not to mention the icebergs) at speeds up to 60mph—more than twice the
speed of a steamship—must have seemed like a Jules Verne science fiction story
come true.
And they were indeed
luxury liners—the R101 had 50 luxurious staterooms, a dining room that sat 60,
two multi-windowed promenade decks, and, last but not least, an asbestos-lined
smoking lounge that could accommodate 24 smokers (considered a necessity
because almost everybody smoked in those days—many old-timers can remember
being examined by a physician with a lit ciggie dangling from his lips).
The British dream
was that these ships would ply the airways of the world, connecting the far-flung
outposts of the Empire, with no point on Earth more than a few days’ travel
away. (I have no idea why such a
visionary vehicle would be given such a prosaic name as “R101”—you’d think they
would have called it HMA Victorious
or some such. The Germans, on the other hand, usually a by-the-numbers kind of
people, gave their airships names like Graf
(Count) Zeppelin and Hindenburg.)
The Brits felt the pressure
of competition from the Germans, and after what some considered to be inadequate
testing, the R101 was declared ready for its maiden voyage. And not a short demonstration hop, either,
but a continent-spanning voyage all the way to India, with a refueling stop in
Egypt.
With various
dignitaries on board, including Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air, and
Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, the R101 lifted from Cardington,
Bedfordshire on October 4, 1930.
A few hours later,
over France, the ship began behaving erratically, and the crew’s efforts to
correct it failed. R101 crashed near Beauvais, and immediately caught fire,
killing 48 of the 56 passengers, a much higher death toll than the 36 deaths in
the Hindenburg crash in Lakehurst,
New Jersey 8 years later. But unlike the Hindenburg
disaster, the R101 had no newsreel cameras filming all of the gory details, nor
a second-by-second account from an emotional radio newscaster.
Still, the British
government was discouraged enough to abandon its airship project, leaving the
field wide open to the Germans, who continued regular Transatlantic service for
years with the Hindenburg, the Graf Zeppelin, and the Graf Zeppelin II.
And, contrary to
popular belief, the Hindenburg crash
in 1938 did not end airship travel. After the crash, more than 400 tickets were
sold for the next available flight. But Nazi Germany scrapped the remaining
airships to use the materials for building fighter planes. And after 1941, New
Jersey was no longer a destination for Nazi-owned aircraft. Airship travel was
killed by World War II, not by safety concerns.
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