Slide Rule (18 page)

Experimental work, however, is not susceptible to such pressures; if a gasbag chafes and leaks or an outer cover splits, no vapourings of a Secretary of State will put it right. To rectify such troubles a designer must be given time to think and to experiment; it does not help for an impatient politician to bedevil the designer by pointing out that the delay is inconveniencing the politician, the great man himself. It is doubtful if such considerations ever entered Lord Thomson’s head, for in July 1930 he was minuting:

Perhaps the words of the designer may be recalled again, because it was about that time that he said,

The end of the story was not very far away now. R.101 was parted and the new bay was inserted in her middle, with all the huge complications to her various controls and services that such an operation entailed. At the same time two reversing engines were fitted, and the staff at Cardington did all that could be done within the time to rectify the chafing gasbags, the leaking gas valves, and the dubious outer cover. It proved quite impossible to complete the work in time for the ship to fly in September, and it appears that Lord Thomson arranged for the air matters which the Imperial Conference were to discuss to be postponed till October the 20th. A schedule was laid down by Lord Thomson at the end of August by which the ship was to leave for India on October 4th, arrive in Karachi on October 9th, leave Karachi on October 13th, and arrive back in England on October 18th in order that Lord Thomson could step in to the conference room as fresh as a daisy on October 20th. All this was to be done in a totally experimental airship that had never flown at full power, was suffering from grave gasbag and cover defects, and had done no trial of any sort in her lengthened form. To the politician it appeared to be a perfectly reasonable proposal. To us, watching helplessly upon the sidelines, and perhaps also to the unfortunate, hard-driven
men at Cardington, it appeared to be sheer midsummer madness.

By superhuman efforts they got the ship out of the shed and on to the mooring mast on October the 1st. They made a trial flight of sixteen hours on that day and the next; immediately they left the mast the oil cooler of one engine failed so that it was not possible to do a full-power trial. No record of that flight exists, because there was no time to write one; the only reference to it is to be found in one or two personal diaries. Flying conditions were dead calm and so perfect that it was hardly a trial at all, and in these circumstances nothing in the ship gave trouble but the oil cooler.

A final conference was held by Lord Thomson at the Air Ministry on the evening of October 2nd. He wanted to start for India on the following evening but the staff protested that it was necessary for the crew to have some rest. He agreed, and suggested that they start on the next morning. They argued him off that on the grounds that it would entail landing to the mast in Egypt to refuel in the heat of the day, which would be undesirable. An agreement was finally reached to start for India on the evening of Saturday October the 4th. Perhaps the catastrophic nature of his autocracy began to occur to Lord Thomson towards the end of this conference, because he said, “You must not allow my natural impatience or anxiety to start to influence you in any way. You must use your considered judgment.” Fine words for the record, but finer if they had been said a year before and had been backed by sympathetic understanding of the difficulties of his staff.

Before the conference broke up a member of the Air Council, diffident no doubt because of his inexperience with airships, pointed out that the ship had never done a full-power trial. This interesting point was discussed a little, and it was resolved that the ship ought perhaps to do
a full-power trial near home, after leaving Cardington for India. Nothing of the sort was ever done, quite rightly, for there is a time and a place for everything. The time and place for the first full power trial of R.101 was not in bad weather in the middle of the night.

Before an aircraft may fly over foreign territory it must have been granted a certificate of airworthiness by its country of origin. The two university professors had been engaged again to report upon the R.101 as lengthened by the addition of the extra bay, and the Air Council had stated that they would be guided by that report in the decision whether or not R.101 should be granted a certificate of airworthiness. That report was never received; the two professors were engaged in writing it when they received news of the disaster. So far as they had written, it was dubious in content; they called attention to large changes in the forces in the structure of the ship as compared with previous calculations submitted to them, and complained of the paucity of information on the final condition of the ship. If they had ever finished their report, however, they would probably have approved the issue of a certificate, but before doing so they would probably have demanded further information which might well have spun the matter out for another three months. There is no indication that there was anything very disastrously wrong with the ship within the limited fields that they had been commissioned to examine.

When every safety precaution, including the 48-hour flight trial with its six hours at full power in bumpy weather, had been abandoned, a scrap of paper could not be allowed to hold up the Indian flight. The international agreement on the safety of aircraft, however, had to be complied with, so a certificate of airworthiness was written out in the Air Ministry and handed to the captain of R.101 just before the start of the last flight, as soon as the
inspectors were satisfied with the physical condition of the ship. It stands to the credit of the French Government that after the disaster on French soil they did not make an issue of this matter; between friends some things are better forgotten.

R.101 started from Cardington on her last flight at 6.30 on the evening of Saturday October 4th 1930 carrying six passengers including Lord Thomson and his valet, and six officials from the Royal Airship Works, four of whom held positions of prime responsibility in the design of the ship.

At the time of the start, the weather forecast was not good, though it was not so bad as to prevent departure. It covered a period to 1 a.m. on the following morning, and showed deteriorating conditions with westerly winds of 20 to 30 m.p.h. over Northern France and better conditions further south. In view of a falling barometer Scott, who was in charge of flying operations, did what he could to expedite departure, though his anxiety was not so great as to prevent him from wasting twenty-five minutes in circling over Bedford before setting course for London.

In those days the art of weather forecasting was not so well advanced as it is now, and bad weather was developing more quickly than had been anticipated. At 8.08 p.m. a revised weather forecast was wirelessed to R.101, which was then over London. It forecast a wind over Northern France of 40 to 50 m.p.h. drawing more southerly, that is, becoming more of a head wind, with much low cloud and rain.

At that time it would have been quite possible for Major Scott to have abandoned the flight and to have returned to the mooring mast at Cardington to wait for better weather conditions. Bearing in mind that he was in charge of an airship that had never flown in bad weather and which had done virtually no trials at all since the major operation of
lengthening her to increase her lift, it now appears reckless that he should have pressed on, in view of this forecast. It is, however, very easy to be wise after the event, and especially twenty-four years after. In those years, standards of safety in the air have undergone great changes. A pilot who turns back and lands because he considers it dangerous to go on is likely to receive praise and advancement in his profession nowadays, but that was by no means the mental atmosphere in 1930. In those days a pilot was expected to be brave and resolute, a daredevil who was not afraid to take risks. Moreover, the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson of Cardington himself, was on board, and to turn back would destroy the whole of his political programme. One imagines that this weather forecast must have been discussed quietly in a corner, with long faces, but the ship went on.

With the increasing component of head wind, R.101 crossed the Channel slowly, somewhat hampered by the fact that one engine went out of action for a couple of hours and was not got going again till shortly before she reached the coast of France at about 11 p.m. To battle against the wind, she then cruised on all five engines at a speed of 54 knots, 62 m.p.h., which was about her maximum cruising speed. It is doubtful if the ship had ever before been flown at so high a speed as that, because initially she had carried one engine for astern use only, and on her one trial flight before she left for India one engine had gone out of action soon after the start. She was, in fact, doing her full-power trial in exceptionally bad weather with low cloud and driving rain, in pitch darkness in the middle of the night, over a foreign country.

By two o’clock in the morning, after flying for about seven and a half hours, she had got no further than Beauvais, about 220 miles from Cardington. Nothing untoward had happened up till then. In the bad weather
she was rolling and pitching a good deal and she was making slow progress, but watch was changed normally at two o’clock, which would not have happened if there had been any sense of emergency. She was then flying about a thousand feet above the ground.

At about ten minutes past two the ship got into a long and rather steep dive, which was sufficiently steep to throw the engineers attending to the engines off their balance. She was brought out of this dive on to an even keel for a few moments, but then dived again and hit the ground, not very hard. Immediately she burst into flames and was totally consumed in a few seconds. The cause of the fire was probably due to the ignition of a mixture of air and of the gas escaping from the damaged gasbags by a spark from a broken electrical circuit.

Of the fifty-four persons on board her, only six survived, four of whom were engineers in the power cars. All the officers of the ship, and all the officials, and all the passengers perished in the fire, including Lord Thomson.

A public enquiry was held to ascertain the cause of the disaster. Nobody from our organisation was invited to give evidence or to make any suggestion out of our experience; the bitterness of competition lasted after death. It is doubtful, however, if we could have added very much. The conclusions reached were almost certainly correct, though of necessity they were based on surmise to a large extent. If a technical opinion had been taken from us it could hardly have helped being an unkind one, for we had said derogatory things about the competence of the government staff and we could hardly have gone back on those opinions at the enquiry. I think the decision to take no evidence from us was right.

The conclusion reached was that the disaster had been caused by a large rent suddenly occurring in one of the most forward gasbags of the ship. A plot of the ship’s
course assuming that such a thing had happened coincided very closely with the reported dives of the ship just before the accident. As to what had caused the gasbag failure, the Court suggested that a large outer cover failure had occurred on top of the ship in a forward region, thus exposing the gasbags to the violence of the air flow at 54 knots. Small rents were probably already present in these gasbags due to chafing, and these may well have joined up rapidly to an enormous tear. To my mind this is certainly the truth of it.

A MAN’S OWN EXPERIENCES determine his opinions, of necessity. I was thirty-one years old at the time of the R.101 disaster, and my first close contact with senior civil servants and politicians at work was in the field of airships, where I watched them produce disaster. That experience still colours much of my thinking. I am very willing to recognise the good in many men of these two classes, but a politician or a civil servant is still to me an arrogant fool till he is proved otherwise.

I had little to do with civil servants of high rank in the years following the R.101 disaster, and I had little leisure for some years to think back and analyse the causes of that tragedy. I considered at the time that the disaster was caused by the actions of the men at Cardington; I do not think that now. The men at Cardington were honest, hardworking men doing their best in a job that was rather too big for them. The first-class brains in the Air Ministry, the high executive civil servants at the top, should have been able to assess the position correctly and take action that would have avoided the disaster. They had plenty of evidence, extending over several years.

Either these men at the Air Ministry were extraordinarily stupid, which I do not believe, or they appreciated that quite abnormal and unjustifiable risks were being taken with R.101. If the latter be true, then they failed to speak up against Lord Thomson because they were afraid. If just one of them had stood up at the conference
table when the issue of the certificate of airworthiness was under discussion, and had said—“This thing is wrong, and I will be no party to it. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but if you do this, I’m resigning”—if that had been said then or on any one of a dozen previous opportunities, the disaster would almost certainly have been averted. It was not said, because the men in question put their jobs before their duty.

Perhaps it is easy for an engineer to write like this, for he can get another job without much difficulty in some other branch of engineering; perhaps it is even easier for an author. That should not blind us to the facts, however, that in this case a number of high civil servants shirked their duty to preserve their jobs. It may be that under modern conditions of life in England it is unfair to expect a man who has spent his life in government service and is unfitted for any other occupation to place his duty to the State before his job. But if that be so, it should be clearly realised that in certain circumstances these high civil servants will not do their duty, though all the honours in the book be showered on them by the Crown.