HIS MAJESTY'S AIRSHIP

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.