Fatal Flight: The True Story of Britain's Last Great Airship by Bill Hammack

Author:Bill Hammack [Hammack, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ENGINEERING / History SCI034000 SCIENCE / History, TEC002000 TECHNOLOGY &amp, TEC056000 TECHNOLOGY &amp, ENGINEERING / Aeronautics & Astronautics, HIS015070 HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century
ISBN: 9781945441028
Publisher: Articulate Noise Books
Published: 2017-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

In 1926, Britain’s Director of Civil Aviation hailed R.101 as the “greatest adventure in construction engineering of our time” and, yet, in charge was Vincent Richmond, R.101’s chief designer—a man with no training in engineering and no experience designing any airborne craft. Richmond studied chemistry at the Royal College of Science, and his sole practical experience with airships was in creating the waterproof finish applied to the outer cloth covers of airships and small military balloons. His engineering experience was limited to a short stint, before the First World War, designing docks for S. Pearson and Sons, a large construction firm.

Sometimes Richmond’s decisions shocked his engineering staff. When he ordered the gas bag netting let out to gain more lift, a Works’ engineer noted that this “violated the essential feature of Michael Rope’s careful design.” To make up for Richmond’s sketchy technical training, his staff at the Works had to “balance the gaps in his engineering knowledge,” as a colleague discreetly phrased it; or, as another delicately said, they “supplemented” his technical knowledge.

For example, Harold Roxbee, an engineer at the Works, pointed out to Richmond an error in his design for R.101’s framework: the cross-section of the ship near the tail would not be symmetrical and this would disrupt airflow over the airship. The cigar-shaped framework of all airships arose from a set of rings spaced along a central axis and linked from back to front by long girders. At least twenty of these girders, Roxbee explained to Richmond, were used in all airship designs, but because Richmond designed R.101 with only fifteen girders the cross-section of R.101 as it tapered to its tail lost its symmetrical, nearly circular shape.

Roxbee pleaded with Richmond to increase the number of girders, but Richmond dismissed this suggestion. When R.101’s framework was assembled, the section near the tail was indeed a distorted circle. Roxbee solved the problem by retrofitting—an action never desired by an engineer. He had the girders twisted as they neared the tail to keep the cross-section circular.

After R.101’s crash, the young Roxbee thrived as an aeronautical engineer and his development of the gas-powered turbine for jets earned him a knighthood.

Criticism of Richmond’s R.101 design wasn’t limited to the Works’ staff. Two of the greatest airship engineers of Richmond’s era thought R.101’s framework deficient. Ludwig Dürr, the chief architect for the Zeppelin Company, praised R.101 in public—“I regard R.101 as one of the best airships ever designed and constructed,” he told Richmond a month before the ship’s crash—but in private he expressed reservations about the design. Dürr worried that the ship’s unbraced rings, in contrast to the wire spokes of the zeppelin frame, could never be made light enough. Their weight, he thought, reduced payload and fuel, which hampered R.101’s potential as a commercial vehicle because its range would be far too short. And even more severe was the opinion of Britain’s most experienced airship designer.

Barnes Wallis designed four of R.101’s predecessors: No. 9 in 1916, No. 23 in 1917, No. 26 in 1918, and R.

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