October 5th in History

The R101:

The other destructive and perhaps more significant factors in the R101 disaster were from intereference in its design and construction by the government - in particular the Air Ministry led by Lord Thompson.

The Government was anxious to prove a State-owned organisation could design and build an airship more rapidly and successully than its commercial rivals building the R100.

It might have been just as capable technically but Lord T's ministry did not allow that. It rushed the work, interfered with the specifications, allowed little or no time for proper design and testing; all to beat the R100 into the air.

One of its biggest blunders was insisting on using British-built Diesel engines instead of the only suitable alternatives, developed by Maybach to be relatively light-weight for aeronautical applications, but German. The only existing British-made engines available were for railway locomotives, in which a proportionally high mass is an advantage.


The R101's maiden flight was to have reached India, the British Empire's "Jewel in the Crown". She flew not much more than 100 miles from London before crashing in the early hours of the morning; luckily onto a field though not far from the farmhouse she had passed over.

R100 completed a number of safe, successful Trans-Altantic flights; but was grounded and eventually scrapped only because her rival's and the Hindenburg disasters destroyed public confidence in these huge, hydrogen-bouyant aircraft.

By comparison, these airships crossed the Atlantic in about 3-4 days, depending on head or tail wind. The fastest liners, operated in those days as ferries not for tourist-cruising, generally took a week.


The Air Ministry thought it knew all about air-liners too, instigating the post-WW2 Bristol Aeroplane Company's commercially-wrong Bristol Brabazon, named after the minister responsible.

A massive, very over-specified, luxury craft intended for trans-Atlantic flight, the prototype
was completed in 1949 but never entered service due to both serious structural problems found in testing, and rapidly changing commercial needs rendering it superfluous.

The design was helped by experience in converting heavy bomber designs to civilian passenger use; rather ironically given that the Brabazon needed the BAC's runway extending, destroying the village of Filton to do so.

.....

The Americans had a go at something similar: Howard Hughes' enormous Hughes H‑4 Hercules, flying-boat nicknamed, to Hughes' disapproval, the "Spruce Goose" although built mainly of resin-laminated birch ply to overcome aluminium supply problems.

Intended as a trans-Atlantic military carrrier capable of carrying two 30-ton tanks or several hundred fully-equipped troops, its one-only-flight was a test in November 1947. This found low-altitude aerodynamic difficulties that led Howard Hughes to declare it a "failure". After all that cost and work.

It was never fully tested, and military needs changed anyway. At least this behemoth survives.

After a somewhat chequered life in military mothballs then preservation including a terrible proposal to display different bits in different museums, the unwanted "Goose" finally found a retirement nest in the North American Aerospace Museum, in Oregon. Indoors, on public display; her adoptive State a rather appropriate one for looking after a wooden aeroplane!

Her original Hughes hangar is also preserved externally as an officially Historic building, used for a time as a film-studio, now by Google as offices and "events space".