Shute, Nevil by Slide Rule

Author:Slide Rule [Rule, Slide]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-03T19:07:20+00:00

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 bad 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.

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