Slide Rule (17 page)

The Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson of Cardington, must however be mentioned by name in spite of the fact that he also died in the airship, since he was
primarily responsible for the organisation which produced the disaster. Christopher Birdwood Thomson was a professional soldier, born of a military family on both sides. He was a gracious and a cultured man who entered the army as a sapper in 1894 and made fairly rapid progress, becoming a member of the Supreme War Council in 1918. By 1920 he had developed strong Labour interests and had attained the rank of Brigadier-General; he then resigned from the army as a protest against Allied intervention in Russia. He did one or two odd jobs for the Labour Party as a military expert and stood twice, unsuccessfully, for Parliament in the Labour interest, in 1922 and 1923. In 1924 Mr. Ramsay MacDonald appointed him Air Minister in the first Labour Government with a seat in the Cabinet, and since he was unable to secure election to Parliament in the normal way he was created a Baron and made a member of the House of Lords. It was largely through his influence that the original plan of Vickers Ltd to build six airships and operate them was scrapped and the competitive plan instituted that resulted in the production of R.100 and R.101, and as if to indicate where his preference lay, he chose Cardington for his title. The Labour Government that put him in this position lasted only for nine months; when the Conservative Government under Stanley Baldwin succeeded it with a huge majority it stayed in power for five years with Sir Samuel Hoare as Secretary of State for Air, till both airships were practically complete. The second Labour Government came into power then and Lord Thomson again became Secretary of State for Air five months before R.101 made her first flight. The first Baron Thomson of Cardington was therefore responsible for giving the job of building R.101 to the men at Cardington in the first place, and for the conduct of the Air Ministry throughout the period covering the flight trials of both airships.

A wholly apocryphal story is told of a shareholders’ meeting of a great London store at a time when it was not doing so well. An infuriated shareholder, who was no gentleman, got up to castigate the distinguished Board of Directors. “When our country is in peril on the sea,” he announced in measured tones, “ ’oo better to turn to than Admiral Sir Duncan Frobisher? When our country is in peril on the land, ’oo better to turn to than Major-General Lord Banklington? But what the bloody ’ell do they know about ’ams?” Upon Brigadier-General Lord Thomson must rest the responsibility for the decision that the staff at Cardington were suitable persons to build another airship, but it is difficult to see what experience in his previous career qualified him to make such a decision.

Still, there it was, and Lord Thomson became the patron of the airship staff at Cardington. During his five years out of office the position was, no doubt, reviewed from time to time by his successor, Sir Samuel Hoare, and some of the things said by Sir Dennis Burney probably made high civil servants and members of the Air Council wonder if all was well in the Government’s airship department. There seemed to be no occasion to upset the programme, however; no question of any danger could arise until the airships were ready for flight. The Air Council might possibly have initiated an investigation, but it must be remembered that the Air Council was composed of officers who had attained their experience with aeroplanes, and who disclaimed all knowledge of airships. The whole of the airship experience in government service was concentrated at Cardington; if these men had been judged incompetent there were no other airship experts in the country to put into their place. An unfavourable report would have been tantamount to a recommendation that the attempt of the Government to build airships should be abandoned because an Air Vice-Marshal who had no experience of
airships had cold feet. It is hardly surprising that no member of the Air Council felt impelled to take such action.

Under this ménage practically every principle of safety in the air was abandoned, perhaps unconsciously. The first principle of safety in the design of aircraft is that there should be a second check on the design, conducted by an entirely independent body of experts, usually in government employment. This principle was applied in the case of R.100; every detail of the design had to be submitted to the Air Ministry as the design progressed and was sent by them to Cardington for comment; as construction progressed towards completion the officer in charge of flying and the captain designated for the ship made frequent visits to Howden and put in reports at length to their chiefs at Cardington. In cases where the government inspector had any doubts about what was good practice on R.100 he applied to Cardington for guidance. Throughout the construction of R.100, therefore, the men at Cardington were both our judges and our competitors. It must be recorded to their great credit that no serious friction arose from this peculiar organisation; they exercised their powers with restraint and interfered with the design and the construction of R.100 very little. For myself, I was glad that someone else was criticising our designs although I would have preferred it not to be a competitor; everyone makes mistakes from time to time, and in aviation any second check is better than no second check.

No such second check was ever imposed on the design of R.101, except in the case of the strength of the main structure and the aerodynamic design. As with R.100, two university professors of wide experience in these fields were engaged to report on R.101, and these men did their work conscientiously and well, The aerodynamics of R.101 were all right, and so was her structural strength.
Wide though these fields are, however, they cover only a small part of the safety problem of an airship. Questions of fire hazard, outer cover defects, gasbag and gas valve leakage, servo motors, structural overweight, astern power, and engine defects were never referred to these two professors, who had no knowledge or experience that would have enabled them to express an opinion on such matters. The only people in the country who could have given useful guidance on a number of such points were ourselves, at Howden, the competing staff. No limited company in the aircraft manufacturing industry, however, has ever served as an airworthiness authority, and none of the troubles of R.101 were ever referred to us for an opinion. No second check was ever made upon such points. When the inspector on the ship put in a very strongly worded report to his chief at the Air Ministry dealing with the number of gasbag leaks on R.101, the report was forwarded to Cardington for comment and the soothing assurances of the designers were accepted. These men were their own judges. Looming over them like Destiny by that time was Lord Thomson of Cardington, who had taken his title from his confidence in them, who had made them and had power to unmake them. It was impossible for them to admit mistakes without incurring discredit far exceeding their deserts, for everybody makes mistakes from time to time. Surely no engineers were ever placed in so unhappy a position.

They suffered, too, from having no contract to fulfil. For R.100 it was stipulated in contractual form that the airship must attain a speed of seventy miles an hour and that her tare weight should not exceed ninety tons, that her gas volume should be five million cubic feet, giving her a disposable load of sixty-two tons; she was to do English trials according to a definite schedule, ending up with a forty-eight-hour endurance flight. When these conditions
had been complied with the contract would be finished and the ship would be accepted, and our expenditure on her would be at an end. There was therefore a strong financial incentive urging us to meet the conditions. In fact they were met substantially. R.100 was about 3% larger than the contract called for and she was a good deal overweight, so that she only carried fifty-four tons; on the other hand she was eleven miles an hour faster than the terms of the contract required, so that we could probably have brought her to the contract weights by taking out two of her engines and appurtenances and still have fulfilled the contract in regard to speed. She passed through all her English contract trials with very little trouble.

No such contract incentive was there to help the Cardington designers with a target for performance. They were given the same specification as R.100 as a basis for design, but no penalties of any kind attached to a departure from it or a failure to fulfil it. It was difficult for them, therefore, to stick to the main aim of producing a good airship. The diesel engines were a case in point. It was thought very desirable to develop a diesel engine for use in airships in the tropics, but as the engines finally arrived for installation in the ship they were nearly twice as heavy as the first estimate of the weight. There was no penalty, however, if the ship as a whole came out overweight; no shareholders would lose any money. The diesel experiment was a desirable one, so into the ship the engines went—and by reason of the increased weights the airship as a whole had too little reserve of lifting power and had to have an extra bay put into her, with all the consequential changes that that entailed. Not only the diesel engines were responsible, of course; most of the components of the ship shared in this process leading to a bad and a heavy airship unchecked by any penalty on overweight.

The last and saddest defect of this organisation showed in the flight trials of the R.101. No contractual programme had to be fulfilled and so the trials were liable to be modified by any publicity or political whim, and they were so modified. The last two flight trials of the R.101 before she was cut in two for the insertion of the extra bay were not conducted on a programme that gave over-riding importance to technical matters, as they should have been if the production of a good airship had been the main objective. Instead, she was flown to Hendon to take part in the rehearsal for the R.A.F. display and the flight next day was to take part in the display itself; during that flight she was put into a dive over the display area that was packed with crowds and pulled up steeply at five hundred feet, a manœuvre that resulted in a small structural breakage. It is difficult for a technician to condone the recklessness of a manœuvre such as this carried out by an airship on its flight trials, over a crowd of a hundred thousand people.

She did not fly again until the extra bay had been inserted, when she was taken out of the shed for the last time on October 1st 1930.

The unhappy ship now became the plaything of a politician. A programme of flight trials for R.101 had been drawn up by her captain which finished up with ‘a flight of 48 hours’ duration under adverse weather conditions to windward of base. Ship to be flown for at least 6 hours at continuous full speed through bumpy conditions, and the rest of the flight at cruising speed’. It was agreed by everyone that when R.101 had completed that trial satisfactorily the flight to India could be undertaken with no more than a reasonable degree of risk.

What nobody had foreseen, however, was that the first Baron Thomson of Cardington would insist on flying to India in her, and that his political engagements would
make it necessary for the ship to start for India before a specific date. The reasons behind this extraordinary conduct of the Secretary of State for Air have never been divulged publicly; he certainly was not in the habit of going for test flights in experimental aircraft and there had been no suggestion that he should fly to Canada in R.100. Perhaps he felt that his personal credit was involved in the success of the Cardington ship. He was a Labour politician and clearly believed heart and soul in the efficiency of State enterprise, to a degree that blinded him to all the technical evidence of the shortcomings of R.101. It was rumoured at the time that he was designated to be the next Viceroy of India and that he wished to visit his new empire in the new vehicle of Imperial communications that he had had a hand in producing, arriving from the skies in a manner unknown to any previous Viceroy. If that be true it might provide a motive for his conduct, which resulted in the loss of the ship and the death of forty-eight persons, some of them my own close friends.

It may be, too, that our flight to Canada had given a groundless confidence to people who were wholly ignorant of technical matters; perhaps they thought that because one airship had battled through storms, repaired its damage, and flown in tolerable safety to Canada and back another airship of different design could obviously fly equally well to India and back. It must be remembered that every year the non-technical public grows better informed in technical matters, and that such reasoning, which may seem ludicrous now, was by no means uncommon among politicians and civil servants in 1930.

At that time an Imperial Conference, to be attended by representatives of all the Dominions, had been summoned to meet in London. In these days of air travel such conferences seem to happen every few months, but in those days it was unreasonable to expect the Prime Minister of
Australia or New Zealand to attend such a conference except at long intervals of years, since his travelling time would occupy two months or more. It was desired to interest the Dominions in airship travel at that conference in order that they might set up bases for the airship services that were envisaged. In the opinion of the Secretary of State for Air the flight of R.100 to Canada was not enough. It was necessary, in his view, for R.101 to fly to India and back with himself on board before the conference discussed air matters, in order that he might step in to the conference room fresh from his rapid trip to India and blazing with publicity, and so carry the Dominion premiers along with him upon a programme of expenditure that would place airship services within the British Commonwealth on a firm basis.

The conference was to assemble in the middle of September 1930 and many other subjects beside airships were to be discussed. Investigating the agenda Lord Thomson decided as early as November 1929 that a suitable time for R.101 to fly to India and back would be the end of September 1930, and this date was announced to everyone concerned, with an indication that this date was unalterable because the first Baron Thomson was making his political arrangements on that basis.