His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine

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. (May)