His Majesty's Airship

Starred review from February 27, 2023
Historian Gwynne (Empire of the Summer Moon) delivers a fascinating account of the bad decisions, distractions, naivete, and sheer incompetence behind the crash of the massive British airship R101 in a field outside Beauvais, France, in October 1930. In the late 1920s, when airplanes were “uncomfortable, dangerous and in constant need of refueling,” England’s secretary of state for air, Lord Christopher Thomson, became obsessed with a better alternative: the hydrogen-filled airship. Used as scouts during WWI, hydrogen airships had previously been limited by their flammability, size, and cost. Lord Thomson believed these limits could be overcome, and he set out to build an airship that would connect the British Empire to its many colonies around the world. Interspersing the details of R101’s design and construction with the history of zeppelins, Gwynne reveals how Thomson and Royal Airship Works managers doomed the ship by using archaic cattle intestine skins to hold the hydrogen bags, failing to run proper test flights, employing experimental diesel engines, and ignoring weather patterns that predicted massive thunderstorms. Forty-eight people, including Thomson, died in the crash. Meticulously researched and vibrantly written (secured to a mooring mast, the 777-foot-long airship is “a giant silver fish floating weightless in the slate-gray seas of the sky”), this is an immersive and enlightening account of how hubris and impatience can lead to disaster. Photos.

March 15, 2023
The tale of a forgotten aeronautical disaster. Popular historian Gwynne, author of Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon, tells the story of the dirigible known as R101, a behemoth "larger by volume than the Titanic." It resembled the Titanic in other ways, but the Exxon Valdez comes to mind as Gwynne examines the sobriety of its captain at a critically important moment. The author centers his narrative on the zeppelin's champion, a member of the minor British nobility known as Lord Thomson of Cardington, the place name referring to "a gritty little industrial suburb" whose workers built the world's largest airship in 1930. In those days, notes the author, airplanes were confined to short-distance flights, whereas helium- or hydrogen-filled giant balloons could travel at a comfortable clip across vast expanses of land or ocean. The trouble was, as the zeppelins that bombarded London during World War I showed, these balloons were extremely vulnerable to fire--if not in midair, then when they crashed. Gwynne nimbly recounts the odd politics of the construction of R101, which involved government support and a good bit of backroom dealing, as well as the details of balloon construction, including gasbag intestines that "might normally have been used as sausage casings"--and thus might not have inspired confidence. Needless to say, things did not end well for R101, and the author devotes his later pages to an autopsy of the disaster that befell it as well as the tragic tales of other airships, such as the U.S. Navy's Akron, "the worst airship disaster in history," and, most famously, the Hindenburg. Gwynne also spins a nicely intriguing side story involving Thomson and his infatuation with a Romanian princess who served as his muse, a brilliant woman who uttered amusing apothegms such as, "Giving a virgin to a man is like giving a Stradivarius to a monkey." A sturdy, well-paced contribution to aviation history.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2023
Gwynne (Hymns of the Republic, 2019) meticulously recounts the final flight of the British airship R101 and the entire zeppelin era in this engaging history of an overlooked subject. Destroyed in a devastating crash on its maiden voyage in 1930, with 48 fatalities, the R101 was heralded as Britain's great entry into long-distance flight (nearly impossible for airplanes at the time). The doomed flight was scheduled to leave from England and arrive in Karachi, India, but it crashed in a storm in France. Gwynne documents how the poor weather conditions were known early on, but there was command confusion, leading to his examination of the struggle between the official captain and Major Herbert Scott, the "country's preeminent airship pilot," who was supposedly just riding along but was given authority over the route and in-flight decisions. There is plenty of international zeppelin history here, but it is the personal conflicts in the R101 control room, exacerbated by Scott's spiraling problem with alcoholism, the social context, and the near minute-by-minute presentation of the tragic flight that will capture reader attention.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.