Slide Rule (16 page)

None of us slept that night; we were all busy comparing notes and sorting out exactly what had happened to us, and writing it down while it was fresh in the memory in order that we could provide for future airships being designed to withstand these violent storms which we had met in Canada but not in England. The fin repairs required attention, too, but these were straightforward, being long slits only.

In the middle of the night, at about two in the morning, the myriad lights of a city showed up ahead of us where Montreal should have been, but in the black sky above these lights, suspended in the night, we saw an enormous fiery cross. I stared at it in consternation till somebody voiced my secret thoughts, and said, “That’s not Montreal. That’s the New Jerusalem. This is it, boys.”

We discovered later that Montreal, being a Roman Catholic city, has a great cross made of steel girders erected on the top of Mount Royal; this is picked out in electric lights. That night it brought a healthy laugh among a lot of very tired men.

We moored to the mast at St. Hubert airport at dawn, 78 hours out from Cardington; we had five tons of fuel left. The great circle distance is about 3300 land miles, so we had averaged about 42 m.p.h. It must be remembered that at that time only one aeroplane had made a direct flight across the Atlantic from East to West against the prevailing wind, starting from Ireland and crashing on an island off the coast of Newfoundland at the very limit of
its fuel, so that our performance, being twice the speed of ship and train from London to Montreal, gave some commercial promise.

The Canadians gave the ship a tremendous welcome. Over a hundred thousand people visited the airport to see the ship each day for several consecutive days; the city was placarded with welcoming notices, and they even wrote a song about us with a picture of Booth on the cover of the sheet music. There were innumerable functions in the fortnight that we stayed there, but my own time was largely occupied with making good the fins and other defects in the ship. In this we were greatly helped by the aircraft department of Canadian Vickers; needless to say, I saw to it that we had plenty of spare fabric sheets prepared for our journey home.

We stayed in Montreal for twelve days. The defects in the ship were all repaired in two or three days, and the ship then made a local flight to Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls that lasted for twenty-four hours. I stood down from this flight to permit the maximum number of Canadian passengers to be taken; this was the only flight that the ship ever made when I was not in her. Accordingly I saw her flying for the first time over Montreal; she looked quite a good job.

Next day I prescribed the necessary patch for the boom of the girder which had been damaged. The decision to go home on five engines was a reasonable one in the circumstances, since the prevailing wind across the North Atlantic is from the west and we could expect a quick and easy trip. We had spent some time and ingenuity in designing the slinging derricks, which were a sort of detachable crane that could be fitted to an engine car to lower an engine down to the ground when the ship was at the mast, and to hoist up another one. It was irritating that an organisational failure at Cardington prevented this equipment from being on hand when it was needed.

This trip to Canada was my first visit to the American continent. I had two good friends from my Oxford days living in Montreal, and in my short leisure time there I saw something of the way of life in the Dominion and in the countryside around Lake Magog, where one of my friends, Percy Corbett, was buying a small farm. For the first time in my life I saw how people live in an English-speaking country outside England, and in view of my decision twenty years later to go and live in Australia it is interesting to read the last words that I wrote in that diary about Canada.

The homeward journey to Cardington was uneventful. We left Montreal in the evening in order to have the calmer conditions of night flying over the continental land mass; we had eleven Canadians on board as passengers, mostly journalists.

An uneventful journey is a good journey for the technician.

So we came back to England:

So ended the Canadian flight of R.100, and the last flight she ever made; the ship never flew again. She was put back into her shed at Cardington, and the whole effort of that station was devoted to the R.101 in preparation for her flight to India which ended in disaster. After that disaster the airship programme in England was abandoned, perhaps rightly in view of the increasing efficiency of the aeroplane. R.100 was broken up and sold for scrap; only a few pieces of her structure now survive as museum curiosities and as memorials to our endeavour.

The success of our Canadian flight undoubtedly was instrumental in bringing about the disaster to R.101. Up to that point it was still possible for the Cardington officials
to declare that neither ship was fit for a long flight. But when we came back relatively safe and sound from Canada that last way of escape was closed to them; now they had to fly R.101 to India or admit defeat, accepting discredit and the loss of their jobs. They chose to fly.

I MADE MY LAST VISIT to Cardington, in a technical capacity, some time in September 1930. It was quite shortly before the last trial of R.101, so I suppose it would have been about the middle of the month. I cannot remember what I went for, but at that time I was drawing up a programme of modifications to R.100 as a result of the experience of our Canadian flight, and I imagine that I went to discuss this with Squadron Leader Booth, the captain, and Captain Meager, the first officer of the ship. Probably the Aircraft Inspection Department inspector came into it, too, because I would have wanted to have a personal talk with him before finalising the modifications.

On that visit, I found a terrible atmosphere at Cardington. I write that with some diffidence, because I made no notes and kept no diary, and I cannot remember now what it was that impressed me so badly except one thing: that the crews of both airships appeared to be completely out of hand. A long period of inactivity was evidently ahead of R.100 and the crew were working largely upon R.101; they seemed to have become uninterested and idle. The officers of R.100 had been put very much on one side by the Cardington officials and were being allowed no part in the preparation of R.101, and the men did not seem to be obeying any orders unless it suited them to do so, which was seldom. There was an atmosphere of cynical disillusionment about the place, very depressing.

I found Booth and Meager virtually doing nothing in a
little office in the shed that housed R.100. They were pleased to see me, but I think they had been warned not to talk to me too much; members of our organisation were quite unwelcome at Cardington at that time. They gave me a cup of tea and then, thawing, they shut the door, looked out of the window into the shed to see that no one was about, and pulled out from under a desk a couple of square yards of outer cover fabric. Booth said, “What do you think of that?”

It was ordinary outer cover, linen fabric, silver doped on a red oxide base. On the inner surface two-inch tapes had been stuck on with some adhesive, evidently for strengthening. I didn’t know what I was expected to say, and turned it about in my hands, and suddenly my hand went through it. In parts it was friable, like scorched brown paper, so that if you crumpled it in your hand it broke up into flakes. I stared at it in horror, thinking of R.100. “Good God,” I said. “Where did this come from?”

“All right,” said Booth. “That’s not off our ship. That’s off R.101.”

I asked, “But what’s happened to it? What made it go like this?”

They told me that the new outer cover for R.101 had been doped in place upon the ship. When it was finished, it was considered that it ought to be strengthened in certain places by a system of tapes stuck on the inside, and for the adhesive they had used rubber solution. The rubber solution had reacted chemically with the dope, and had produced this terrible effect.

There was nothing that he or I could do about it. I said, “I hope they’ve got all this stuff off the ship.”

He smiled cynically. “They
say
they have.”

Two points in this incident deserve some notice. Firstly, Cardington was a department of the Air Ministry and had immediate access to the whole of the government research
organisation. There was undoubtedly somebody at Farnborough who could have told them at once that rubber solution and dope did not agree; undoubtedly the dope manufacturers could have told them. I think that at that stage, three weeks before the R.101 disaster, they were floundering, making hurried and incompetent technical decisions, excluding people from their conferences who could have helped them.

The second point is this. R.101 made one short test flight on October the 1st in very perfect weather; during this flight she made no full-speed trials because the oil cooler of one engine failed. She started for India on October the 4th, and met some very bad weather over France. She crashed at Beauvais, and the initial cause of the disaster was almost certainly a large failure of the outer cover on top of the ship near the bow. It seems to me very probable that some of this rotted fabric had been left in place, but nobody will ever know that for certain.

With that my personal association with R.101, such as it was, came to an end and anything further that I know was derived from hearsay at the time and from the report of the enquiry into the accident. If I go on now to round off the story and to draw conclusions it is for a definite purpose, and that purpose is this.

In many fields of technical development security is now paramount, and there is a growing tendency for government officials concerned with a particular technique to say that no security is possible unless the development is carried out by government officials. That may or may not be true. The one thing that has been proved abundantly in aviation is that government officials are totally ineffective in engineering development. If the security of new weapons demands that only government officials shall be charged with the duty of developing them, then the
weapons will be bad weapons, and this goes for atom bombs, guided missiles, radar, and everything else.

The airship programme constitutes one of the few occasions when a government department has been placed in direct competition with private enterprise. Twenty five years should be sufficient to soften the acerbities of the time, and no security plea can be brought forward to mask a close analysis of the reasons for the failure of the Government’s airship. These reasons were fundamental to the incursion of a government department into industry and are the same today, whether the product be airships or guided missiles. It seems useful, therefore, to pursue the airship matter to its end.

In this account I have done my best to avoid mentioning the names of the five men who held positions of prime responsibility at Cardington, four of whom were killed in the disaster to the airship. The disaster was the product of the system rather than of the men themselves. The worst that can be said of them is that they were not very good engineers. They may have been a little vain in undertaking work beyond their capacity especially in view of the disaster to R.38. If this be a fault it is a fault that most adventurous engineers would yield to, if they were allowed. Industry, however, is ruled by Boards of Directors whose function is to prevent the engineers that they employ from taking on work that is beyond their powers and so producing a disaster. They do this by virtue of their own long industrial experience, which enables them to assess the difficulties of the job and to engage staff suitable to do it. The men at Cardington had no comparable restraint; the civil servants and the politicians above them in the Air Ministry were quite unfit to exercise that type of control.