The Airships
The R100 was designed by Barnes Wallis, with Nevil Shute Norway as Chief Calculator, responsible for all the stress calcultions. Writing under the name of Nevil Shute, Norway later became a successful novelist, and also wrote a memoir, Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer which gives an account of the airship development program. Design of the R101 was under the direction of Lt.Col. V. C. Richmond. with Michael Rope as his assistant and Harold Roxbee Cox as chief calculator.
It was considered that petrol was unsuitable as a fuel for airships intended for use in hot climates due to its low flash point. For this reason R101 was powered by diesel engines, and R100 was originally intended to use engines using a mixture of hydrogen and kerosene . The program to develop the diesel engines was beset with difficulties, the engines being both overweight and unable to produce the expected power output. Similarly the development of hydrogen/kerosene engines ran into difficulties and so the R100 team made a decision to use existing petrol-fuelled aircraft engines. This resulted in Canada being substituted for India as the destination of the acceptance trial flight.
The initial timetable, drawn up in March 1924, expected construction of R.101 to begin in July 1925 and be complete by the following July, with a trial flight to India being planned for January 1927. R100 was also delayed, and neither flew until late 1929. The cause of the dely to the R.101 was largely due to the extensive research program which preced its construction: among other things this involved the construction and load-lting of an entire bay of the proposed design. The delay to R100 was the result of the limited resources available, a result of it being constructed under a fixed-price contract: It was obvious fairly early in the design procss that design and construction costs would exceed the purchase price.
Both airships were overweight, R101 more so than R100, partly due to its diesel engines. These were both heavier than expected and also did not have the anticipated power output. R.101's weight problem was compounded by its having a smaller gas capacity than R100, a result of its innovatory structural design, in which the transverse ring-frames occupied a larger proportion of the interior volume of the ship.
| R101 | R101 after extension | R100 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total fixed weight | 113.60 long tons (115.42 t) | 117.90 long tons (119.79 t) | 105.52 long tons (107.21 t) |
| Engines weight | 12.63 long tons (12.83 t) | 12.26 long tons (12.46 t) | 6.22 long tons (6.32 t) |
| Service load including ballast |
18 long tons (18 t) | 18 long tons (18 t) | 18 long tons (18 t) |
| Gasbag capacity | 4,893,740 cu ft (138,575 m3) | 5,509,753 cu ft (156,018.8 m3) | 5,156,000 cu ft (146,000 m3) |
| Total lift Gasbags at 96% capacity pressure height of 1,200 ft (370 m) |
142.62 long tons (144.91 t) | 160.57 long tons (163.15 t) | 150.26 long tons (152.67 t) |
In August 1930, R100 made the transatlantic journey to North America, visiting Quebec, Montreal and Toronto.
R101 was dispatched on a flight to India under marginal conditions in October 1930, with a hastily issued Certificate of Airworthiness. She crashed soon after leaving on a stormy night in France. The R101 had had an extra gas cell inserted in the middle to give adequate lift for the trip to India, and this trip was to be the first full-load test with the additional section. The exact cause is still a matter of dispute amongst airship enthusiasts and historians. Sir Peter Masefield lists thirteen factors in his detailed history of R101: without any one of them the disaster might not have happened. The desire of all involved to achieve a flight to India before the conclusion of the 1930 Imperial Conference (at which decisions would be taken on the future of the airship programme) led to a premature flight in adverse weather conditions.
Read more about this topic: Imperial Airship Scheme
Famous quotes containing the word airships:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)