The R101 Disaster Back in October 2010 the Newsletter folder was looking slimmer than usual, so I put out a request for items. Amongst others, Jim Prettyman put me in touch with a friend of his, Euan Murray. Jim and Euan had been out to the Museum of Flight that summer to look for two models that Euan's father had made in the 1930s and which had been on display at Chambers Street for many years, but were now part of the reserve collection. I featured the model of DH 60 Moth G-EBNO in the December 2010 issue and the second model was of the R101 airship. A fascinating story about this was about to reveal itself. 1
J. Balfour Murray ARAeS was an important aeronautical engineer in Scotland at the time. His war service was spent managing an aircraft components factory at Donibristle in Fife and he introduced many innovations to dramatically speed up the servicing of aero engines. Like most engineers he enjoyed a practical challenge. When the R101 crashed on its maiden flight to India in 1930 there was a Board of Inquiry but the results were somewhat woolly. Jack Murray had a habit of picking away at a problem until he had worked out what went wrong so to satisfy his curiosity he carried out his own research and even built an accurate model of the airship. This model was to take on a special significance as it is the only one in the world showing all the modifications that had been put in place at the time of the accident. 2
So what actually caused the R101 to come down? Peter Masefield devoted years to the problem and wrote about this in 'To Ride the Storm'. Group Captain Ernest Johnston, son of the R 101 s navigator, wrote about the disaster in Airship Navigator and in the 1980s Bristol University ran computer simulations. Neville Shute put forward his opinions in Slide Rule and 'Aeroplane' magazine had an excellent short article recently in the November 2010 issue. At the risk of over-simplifying, the current theory is that as R101 ploughed through the rain and wind near Beauvais, less than eight hours after leaving Cardington and heading for its half way stop at Ismailia in Egypt, a tear in the nose fabric started. As it grew, the aerodynamics were compromised and the nose started to take on water, leading to a slow but inevitable descent. It touched the ground at about 12 mph or so and the accident should have been survivable if the hydrogen had not caught fire. Hydrogen by itself will extinguish a flame, surprisingly, but when mixed with oxygen it becomes highly combustible. Hydrogen from damaged gas bags mixed inside the outer envelope with the air recently forced in through the nose. Still all should have been well as for safety reasons the engines were all diesels, but fire was started by either sparks from the small Ricardo petrol engines used as starter motors, a compromise to save weight, or by the ignition of calcium flares stored in the control cabin when the airship hit the ground. Of 55 on board 48 were lost. This was not just the end of one airship but the end of all airships in Britain and the sense of devastation and disappointment amongst everyone involved must have been great. They were not the evolutionary dead end we think of today, they were within a whisper of developing into something really useful and about to achieve great things. R 101 was one of two airships, built to the same requirements but by competing design teams. It was an important project and almost everyone you can think of who was connected with aviation at the time was involved with the R 100 or the R 101, including Hugh Dowding. He was soon to be the mastermind of the country s defence during the Battle of Britain but for now he was the one who signed off the R 101 as fit for flight, though he later admitted he did it with much anxiety and under great pressure from above. Euan has let us see his father's original correspondence, and this appears on the next few pages. It is compact and anticipates clearly the modern view of events, and I have reproduced it as facsimile because of the wonderful period feel. 3
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Reunited Euan Murray, Jack Murray s son, was reunited in the summer of 2010 with his father s fine model of the R 101 at the Museum of Flight. Thanks to Euan and to Jim Prettyman for all their help in producing this article. 11
Finally, Kenneth Watkins, a friend of Jim s from his days at de Havillands, has recently visited the monument at the site in France of the R 101 s crash, and he sends this photograph. 12