“Not satisfactory,” thought Joe Binks as three tons of ballast water cascaded by the open door of his rear engine car. To Binks, this torrent looked larger than usual for departing from the mooring tower. The ballast water mixed with rain and was swept through the car by the frigid wind, yet Binks was warmed by the heat radiating from the car’s engine a foot from him. No cover or enclosure protected him from this monster of an engine—nine feet long, a foot and a half wide, and weighing nearly two and a half tons—its exposed surface so hot that when the rain struck the engine it evaporated into small clouds of steam. This 650-horsepower locomotive engine filled the car with a deafening din as its eight cylinders spun the engine’s crankshaft. The engine belched sulfurous fumes and filled the car with a diesel-like odor from burning oil. Burning heavy oil as fuel reduced the gasoline needed to twelve gallons, which was used to power the forty-horsepower starting engines. This gasoline was stored in small tanks that sat on trap doors so that, if fire broke out, an engineer could pull a lever and dump the tank and its flammable contents, the lever always in reach because the engineers operated from a workspace at the front of the car. At the moment, Binks shared this space—a three and a half feet by three-quarters of a foot—with fuel tanks, the telegraph, control levers, and two other men: Harry Leech, the foreman engineer, and the dour Arthur “Ginger” Bell, the other engineer assigned to the rear engine car.
As R.101 porpoised in the turbulent air, Bell thought, “Just a little trouble keeping her trimmed.” The trim was best regarded, he’d learned from his many airship flights—his first in 1919 and the most recent the long trek of R.100 to and from Canada—as “the business of the officers.”
The ship’s instability didn’t stop Mr. Leech from leaving the car. Throughout the flight Leech planned to shuttle among the five cars and use his engineering expertise to keep the engines running. He tucked his round glasses into the pocket of his Sidcot suit, leaned out the car’s open door, and grabbed the ladder. Fifteen feet from him, the propeller spun, its suction tugging Leech from the car. Once on the ladder the prop wash was so powerful that it could lift him parallel to the ground, turning him into a human flag tethered to the ladder only by his firm grip. Leech inched his way up the ladder as the rain pelted him, until he passed through a hole into the safety of R.101’s hull.
Once in the hull he traveled forward along the ship’s walkway, the plywood flooring bending under him. He headed for the two engine cars slung near the ship’s center. When he reached the new bay at midship, he paused for a respite from the racket of the ship’s engines. Standing still, he was aware of the ship’s motion. Leech thought the airship pitched and rolled more than usual; he had never felt it roll this much in flight, only at the tower. He compared it to movements he’d experienced when riding on the Royal Navy’s submarine chaser blimps, where he had been an engineer. He hadn’t felt this much motion even when two of those ships crashed.
The First Forty-Five Minutes of R.101’s Final Flight
R.101 departed from the Royal Airship Works mooring tower at 18:36 GMT on October 4, 1930. The airship stayed close to the tower until either Irwin or Scott decided it should continue on to India.
Leech watched the surge of the giant gas bag above him: wind from the ventilators in the cover rushed over the bag and rattled it back and forth but his quiet contemplation lasted only a moment because the walkway was the main thoroughfare from bow to stern. Soon, Michael Rope, R.101’s engineering genius, arrived. Rope, like Leech, continuously roamed the ship; while Leech shuttled between the engine cars below the airship, Rope climbed to the top of each gas bag. He worried that their wire netting—let out to enlarge the bags and increase their lift—might allow the surging bags to smack into the sharp bolts of the metal frame. Leech stopped Rope and pointed to the surging bag above them; Rope assured him that the bag’s wire netting kept it from touching the framework. As Leech continued to the midship engine cars, Rope climbed one of the ladders built into the framework and disappeared between two gas bags.
Nearby, Arthur Disley, a radio operator, stood at the center of R.101 and examined the mass of colored wires in the ship’s main junction box. He doubled as the ship’s electrician, a natural use of the skills of a radio operator because the cantankerous radio equipment required constant repair and maintenance. While an operator must be agile with the telegraph key, literacy in Morse code was mere entry-level knowledge. Disley was trained using The Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy, which devoted 899 pages to fundamental principles of electricity and magnetism, generators, motors, vacuum tubes, circuits and included—aptly for Disley’s work—an appendix on “Resuscitation from Apparent Death by Electrical Shock.” Disley grabbed the leads of the ammeter built into the junction box and verified the load on all the circuits. He started with the three huge aluminum core cables—aluminum to reduce weight—that connected electrical generators in three of the engine cars to the junction box. They pumped 220-volt, three-phase power to the box. Next, he tested the separate circuits that, over the four miles of wiring in R.101, fed electricity to the kitchen, passenger quarters, and the radio room, the latter’s wires a contrasting color because of the importance of radio to the ship’s operation. Once he’d tested all circuits, Disley walked the length of the ship inspecting every one of R.101’s 130 lamps, each in a fitting specially designed to prevent the escape of sparks from a short circuit—a spark that could ignite the five million cubic feet of hydrogen on board. Disley discovered only one bulb burned out: at frame No. 4, just above the two aft engine cars. He changed it and then returned to the radio cabin, where he could smell dinner being cooked next door in the galley.
As Disley worked in the radio cabin and Leech inspected the other engines, Binks left the rear engine car to rest in the crew quarters, while Bell tended the engine. Although the two men worked together during departure, they would now, a half-hour into the flight, alternate in three-hour shifts starting in ninety minutes, with one man sleeping in their shared bunk, and the other in the car monitoring the engine and awaiting telegraphed orders from the control car to change speed. Or, if fire broke out, pulling a handle to jettison the small gasoline tank of the starting engine. Before resting, Binks ate a snack of bread and cheese, pickles, and hot cocoa, but before he could finish word arrived that the rear engine had stopped.
Binks hurried along the ship’s walkway to the opening above the rear engine. He scurried down the ladder, the wind whipping across him at fifty miles per hour, and dropped into the car. Bell explained that the oil pressure had fallen. Unlike a gasoline-powered engine where the oil pump spreads liquid oil to lubricate the engine, here the oil was the fuel: the pump vaporized the oil, converted it to a mist, then sprayed an exact quantity at a precise time into the engine. So important was this action that the engine’s inventor called the oil pump the engine’s “most characteristic feature.” The sequence of actions was so complex—the pump contained seventeen moving parts—that the pumps often failed.
Only a few moments after Binks arrived, the oil pump failed and Bell shut down the engine. He sent Binks up the ladder to get Leech, the engine expert. But Binks’ exit was blocked: First Engineer Bill Gent was descending the ladder. Gent, a longtime airship veteran—a proud member of Scott’s heroic Atlantic crossing—supervised the engine car operators and helped Leech with keeping the engines in repair. The experienced Gent knew that on long flights he must let his engineers rest whenever possible. Besides, the car was too small for a crowd and in a few minutes the shuttling Mr. Leech would arrive. So he ordered Binks back to the crew quarters to sleep.
Routine set in across the airship despite the failure of one engine. It would surely be up and working again soon. In the dining room above Binks, Savidge and his assistants served the passengers a cold meal—no time now for Savidge to delight the crew with his cartoons and caricatures. While the passengers ate, four riggers patrolled the ship looking for any problems with the cloth cover or the gas bags. They climbed into the framework to inspect the gas release valves and to examine the ship’s outer cloth cover. Often they came across Rope sitting atop a gas bag watching it rattle in its wire netting, approaching within inches of the metal framework. The riggers, also, often passed Leech on the walkway as he traveled between visits to the engine cars.
At 8 p.m., almost ninety minutes into the flight, a new watch of First Engineer Gent’s crew shimmed down their ladders to their shiny, egg-shaped engine cars, the prop wash billowing their Sidcot suits, knives dangling from their belts, beating in the wind against their thighs. Joe Binks, part of this next watch, arrived in the rear engine car, pleased to see engine No. 5 churning away. Leech and Gent diagnosed the problem as a faulty pressure gauge, much less serious than a broken pump. Soon after Binks arrived, the tired Bell ascended the ladder, happy to leave the heat, smell, and noise of the engine. He headed to the crew quarters for his supper, then to rest in their shared bunk, number thirteen, still warm from Joe Binks’ body. Once there, Bell picked out the plasticine he’d stuffed into his ears as protection from the clamor of the engine.
The oil pressure in engine No. 5 dropped as R.101 neared a standard landmark: the white clock tower of the glass-covered Metropolitan Cattle Market in Islington, north of London. Binks grabbed the speed lever and pulled it toward himself to reduce the engine to half speed. He and Gent watched the oil gauge: they hoped the pressure would hold steady. It continued to fall so Gent signaled with his hands for Binks to shut down the engine. The only sound in the car now was the distant drone of the other four engines and the whistle of the wind through the open doors.
Above them Leech, on one of his many cycles between engine cars, noticed the engine stop. He scrambled down the ladder. He acted the moment he landed on the car’s floor, conditioned by his time-critical work on Malcolm Campbell’s finicky race cars. Leech ordered Binks to lock the propeller to prevent the engine’s shaft from turning, then to remove the port oil covers to expose the engine’s interior. Binks lay on the car’s floor and slid forward next to the engine, the space barely larger than the width of his shoulders: he could squeeze along the full length of the engine on either side in a space a foot and a half wide at the front of the engine, narrowing to a tight ten inches at the back, where the engine butted against the rear wall. Through the rear wall the crankshaft connected to the propeller. Once Binks removed the last of the port-side inspection covers, he crawled backward to make room for Leech and Gent. The engine’s insides now exposed, the two smaller men scooched along the floor, careful to avoid the eight hot exhaust pipes, and examined the engine’s bearings, connecting rods and oil system. Leech’s expert eye detected no defects, so Binks again slid across the car’s floor, positioning himself to replace all eight inspection covers while the two senior men examined the relief valve on the opposite side of the engine.
As they studied the engine, R.101 passed over the cattle market and then London. The airship flew headlong into the wind, but with Binks’ engine No. 5 still out, the four remaining engines thrust R.101 forward at a ground speed of a mere twenty miles per hour. Once past London, the ship headed for the English Channel and France. But first, it had to rise to 1,200 feet to fly over the chalk hills of Surrey.
The passengers, unaware of engine trouble, listened in the lounge to a broadcast of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” from Queen’s Hall in London, the horn section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra almost masking the howling wind outside. A few intrepid passengers stood on the promenade decks, their backs turned to the brightly lit lounge so their eyes could adjust to the darkness. The city lights of Crockenhill, Otford, and Plaxtol passed under them, then darkness below until a final burst of luminosity from Fairlight Cove, east of Hastings. Three hours after leaving the mooring tower, R.101 swept past the cove’s sandstone cliffs into the darkness of the Channel. With nothing more to see, they returned to the lounge, the somber strains of Elgar long gone, replaced by the upbeat Ambrose and his Orchestra playing the popular “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”
Far below the passengers, unable to hear their music, Binks organized metal disks and springs to repack the engine’s relief valve—the cause, Leech determined, of the drop in oil pressure. As Binks worked, Leech peered out the open door. The weather, he thought, was deteriorating. R.101 dove toward the Channel, coming so close that Leech saw the white spume of its waves.
As the airship neared the Channel, a calcium phosphide flare dropped from the control car. With it the crew measured R.101’s drift caused by crosswinds. The water-activated flare hit the Channel’s surface and burst into a brilliant white flame. The wind was so strong on this flight that the control car dropped a flare every ten minutes or so. The flaming white spot on the waters sped off to the right and behind the airship. The wind blew from the southwest at forty-four miles per hour, modulated often by fierce gusts. To compensate for this crosswind, R.101’s nose pointed into the wind. The ship now flew slightly sideways in the air, but its center traveled nearly due south.
A few minutes before 11 p.m., nearly four and a half hours into the forty-hour flight to Egypt, Binks yanked on the starting cord of the small gasoline-powered starting motor; it revved to life with a high-pitched whine. Binks opened the larger engine’s throttle: it fired without a sputter. He shut off the starting engine and pushed the speed lever away from him until the engine ran at top speed. All returned to normal in the engine car: deafening noise and a diesel-like stench of heavy oil.
R.101, now in mid-Channel, was 155 miles from the mooring tower and 130 miles from Paris. It flew at an air speed of sixty-three miles per hour now that Bink’s engine No. 5 was operating. The wind beat on the cloth cover with a greater, more sustained force than in any of R.101’s test flights. The Middle Watch now took over. The bone-tired Joe Binks, his body aching from hours curled up on the floor, nestled against a hot, smelly engine, was relieved to see Arthur Bell sliding down the ladder. Once Bell replaced him, Binks ascended the ladder and headed along the walkway to bunk number thirteen, still warm from Bell and still reeking of diesel. Alf Cook, fresh from the midship engine car, joined Binks. Cook, a small man with a startling resemblance to Charlie Chaplin, told him that he had never seen the wind so strong while flying on an airship, the ship even coming several times so close to the Channel that he could see the waves.
R.101 chopped through the air over France after midnight, while most passengers and off-duty crew slept. The exhausted Atherstone slept, worn out from operating the elevators in the gusty wind over England. Savidge had laid the breakfast dishes, set for 7:30 a.m. sharp, and then retired. Apart from those assigned to the Middle Watch, only two others were awake: the stalwart Rope, who climbed through the framework to monitor the surging gas bags, and the indefatigable, roving Leech, who chatted with Bell in the rear engine car.
Satisfied that all was well with engine No. 5, Leech climbed up the ladder toward the hull. The weather, he thought, was “very rough,” caused by the “the wind and rain being terrific.” He traveled along the walkway to the haven of the smoking room for a well-earned cigarette before turning in—his first since leaving the Works. He settled on a bench fastened to the starboard wall, the bench’s soft cushion a relief, after lying on the hard floor of the engine car. The windowless room’s metal walls were a pristine white in contrast to the gritty engine cars. It was quiet, the only sound a soft rustle of air drawn up by the ventilator in the ceiling. The gentle rocking of the ventilator was the only trace of the ship’s motion through the gale force wind outside. Leech sat in solitude, satisfied that all five engines were running well.
It was a few minutes before two in the morning.
As Leech dozed, the ship was a few miles north of the small town of Beauvais, just over forty miles (sixty-five kilometers) north of Paris. It flew in trim and a little nose-up. With all five engines operating at full blast the airship maintained an air speed of sixty-three miles per hour, although the high winds slowed it to a crawl of twenty miles per hour ground speed. The ship flew at an altitude of 1,200 feet, but turbulence forced R.101 to oscillate around this height by 200 or 300 feet.
At 2 a.m., the Second Morning Watch took over, yet Joe Binks was asleep in bunk number thirteen—“out to the world,” as he described his deep sleeps. The smell of a steaming mug of cocoa roused him, a gift from George Short, the engineer of the watch. Short shared good news with Binks: engine No. 5 ran well. Binks slipped on his Sidcot suit and ran 150 feet along the walkway to the opening in the hull above engine No. 5. He noticed in the distance Michael Rope hoisting himself into the framework and disappearing into the dark surging bags. Binks slid down the engine car ladder as quickly as possible.
Bell smiled and pointed to the engine car clock: it was three minutes past two, a gentle reminder that Binks was late. Binks leaned in to learn of the engine’s performance during Bell’s shift. Above the din of the engine, Bell detailed the engine’s oil pressures and temperatures over the last three hours. Binks felt the ship shift under him—a motion different from the dips when mooring at the tower, or even the dives after the RAF Display in July. Binks thought it traveled “further.” Even the more experienced Bell noticed the ship canted at “a terrific angle.”
In the smoking room, the ship’s plunge forced Leech to slide on his cushion along the smoking-room bench. A soda-water siphon and some glasses slid off a nearby table, but stayed intact. When the ship returned to horizontal, Leech picked them up and replaced them on the table.
The ship’s dive woke Disley in his cot near the radio cabin. Groggy, he felt the ship right itself. At the same time, in the rear engine car, the engine telegraph rang and its lights flickered: the pointer rotated to “slow”—the control car ordered the engine slowed from 825 to 450 revolutions per minute. Bell pulled the speed control lever toward himself. R.101 dove again, a dive steeper than the first.
As the ship dove, Disley was completely awakened by the gongs clanging for the engines to go slow. A coxswain stormed by the radio cabin with a loud but calm cry of “We’re down lads,” and then hurried to the crew quarters to roust all hands.
The coxswain ordered a rigger just exiting the crew quarters to run to the front of the ship and release a half-ton of emergency ballast. Disley started to rise out of his bed in response to the coxswain’s cry. Suddenly his bed tilted. His head was lower than his feet. He noted that the tilt was greater than when a thunderstorm had forced R.100 to dive near Trois-Rivières, Canada. Disley knew that the slowing engines would generate less electricity, and that some circuits must be shut off. He reached above his bed. He worried that the electrical current might ignite a fire, so better to turn off all circuits. He turned off one of the two circuits, but before he could reach the second, the ship dove steeply.
R.101 smashed into the ground nose first.
At midship, Leech knew that the ship had crashed, but was disoriented. He prepared for a “violent blow,” but heard only a loud “crunch” as the metal framework at the nose collapsed—too mild a noise, it seemed to him, for a catastrophic event.
But then, an explosion blew open the door and threw him against the floor, the brilliant white flash momentarily blinding him. His training as a mechanic took over: the explosion’s sound, he thought, was a “woof … like lighting petrol on the floor” and not the ignition of hydrogen. His analytical mind recorded the color: “very white,” not at all, he thought “like hydrogen flame.”
His analysis ended when the upper deck fell into the smoking room and a girder trapped him in a space only three feet high—the deck above rested on the back of the inbuilt benches. From the collapsed decks, crew and passengers screamed and moaned as fire ravaged the ship. The blown-open smoking-room door exposed the control room, now engulfed in flames. The smoking room filled with thick fumes. Leech, now deprived of air, choked.
A white flash stunned Disley, still in his bed. He heard the clatter of radio equipment, books, and lamps—anything not firmly affixed to the ship. Within seconds a wall of fire surrounded him. It roared like a furnace—“awful, awful,” repeated Disley to himself. He rammed his body into the fabric wall of his cabin and rebounded. Again and again he bounced off the wall until he sunk to the floor, leaned against the wall exhausted, and offered a prayer. “My fate is sealed,” he thought.
The impact tossed Binks, his back to the direction of travel, on his rear. As the engine car skidded along the ground, its bottom caved in. The electrical lamp in the car flickered, then extinguished. In the darkness, the wreckage about them released a long, drawn out rumble like distant thunder. Seconds later the debris surrounding the two men burst into flames. The metal walls of the engine car reflected and intensified the light from the flames and bathed the two men with a fierce glow.
“We are caught,” thought Bell as he looked at the fire raging around the car. Binks glanced at the fuel tank for the starter motor: it contained twelve gallons of explosive gasoline—no time to jettison it now. Flames entered the car and burned a trail across the floor toward the fuel tank. Binks and Bell grabbed oil-stained rags, wrapped them around their hands for protection, and beat the flames. “Hopeless,” thought Binks. “Looks as though all is up, Bell!” he said.
Bell wanted to run through the flames, but Binks convinced him to crouch in the shelter of the car. The fire encroached on them. Binks said he hoped they would suffocate before they burned to death; “far better,” Bell agreed, “than being roasted.”
The heat softened the metal roof of the engine car: it sagged like a sheet of paper. Acrid smoke filled the car and Binks peered through its door. The ship was burning from bow to aft. He thought briefly about the pride and confidence he’d had in the ship. Even reflected on what a “blow” this was to the Royal Airship Works. He and Bell shook hands as death approached. Somber and silent, they resigned themselves to their fate.
In the smoking room, thick, acrid smoke smothered Leech. He struggled to lift a bent girder, and with great effort managed to free himself. He grabbed the leg of the built-in bench and ripped it from the inner wall of the ship. It tore an opening to the outside. He stuck his head through it, gulped in fresh air, then squeezed through the opening. He stood outside the ship, but the cellon windows from the promenade deck blocked his path to safety. The crash knocked the panes from their frames and they now were ablaze on the ground. Propelled by fear of the burning ship beside him, Leech ran through the maze of burning windows until he felt wet, cool grass.
In his bunk, a dispirited Disley lay on the floor; his attempts to beat a hole through the cloth wall had proved futile. The fire raged around him like a tornado. Then, without warning, he felt the floor break, exposing a torn section of the cloth cover below him. He enlarged the hole by beating on it with his fists, punching in a frenzy until he broke through, his hand striking cold ground—a sharp contrast to the blaze behind him. He squeezed his body through the opening and crawled along the seam of the cloth. And then he collapsed.
In the rear engine car, Binks and Bell huddled. Flames engulfed the car. Then, without warning, a half-ton of water thudded on the roof of the engine car. It rushed through the open door and smashed the men against the wall, but it doused the flames. “Splendid and merciful water—our savior,” thought Binks. To avoid inhaling smoke the drenched men slapped over their mouths the charred rags they’d used to beat the flames. Binks hesitated to rush from the car; although there was a fire-free path to the edge of the shattered framework, he could see no farther. Was it safe? But Bell darted from the car and Binks followed, reacting instead of calculating. The two men ran over the charred ground through red-hot, glowing wreckage. They ran until they fell against French soil. Safe now, they looked back at the wreckage as the rain beat on them and the gale-force winds blew black smoke into their eyes.
“Hello, hello! Anybody out? Where are you?” cried Binks.
“Here’s one—Mr. Leech,” replied Leech, obscured by smoke. “Where are you and how many are you?” Binks and Bell identified themselves and fumbled their way to Leech.
The three dazed men surveyed the wreckage. The imposing R.101, the great machine to connect the vast geographic sweep of the British Empire, was now a tangle of debris on the ground. Only the rudder at the stern still stood tall. Rags and strips of fabric hung from it and fluttered in the wind, the center section rocking on its hinges, swinging aimlessly.
Sixty feet in the air, at the tip of the stern, almost untouched by any flames, the ship’s RAF Ensign flapped in the wind—the Union Jack on the flag was partly burned, but the RAF roundel was intact.
Forward from the rudder, the girders of the ship’s framework were twisted, its round rings distorted. Long gone from most of the framework were the delicate gas bags and plasticized cloth cover—both vaporized by the raging fire. Only Rope’s ingenious wire netting remained, like a giant spider web spun over the ship’s carcass. The polished aluminum exterior of a crushed engine car glistened in the flames. The collision with the ground rotated the car 180 degrees, its propeller now facing the wrong way. Beside the ship a row of gilded pillars towered over the wreckage: the remains of the lounge.
The ship’s nose was buried in the spongy ground of a small grove of hazel and oak; the steel mooring pendant that clattered on the cables and snapped into the mooring tower arm with a “most gratifying” click was now caked with mud. The ground was littered with quotidian articles: suitcases, fur-lined boots, charred shaving brushes, a tin of cigarettes, a ticking watch, and, untouched by the flames, the latest issue of Wireless World. And the stores, so carefully stowed by the chief steward, were strewn on the ground: a few loaves of bread, and a still-labeled tin of plums, its juice leaking from the can. From this debris, a charred crew member rose, but then fell back into the flames.
This snapped Binks, Bell and Leech from their shock. They lurched toward the burning wreckage and raced to an engine car. They smashed its windows to free any survivors. Leech cried: “Is there anybody ….” Inside they saw an engineer, his body carbonized, still clutching a wrench in his hand. The inferno drove them back, so the three men circled the blazing ship to search for survivors.
Leech heard a voice from inside. He grabbed a piece of the burning wreckage and used it as a torch. He rushed back into the red-hot girders and freed Disley, the radio operator, who was unconscious at the edge of the ship. The men also found two more engineers, including the Chaplin-lookalike Alf Cook, and two riggers, both severely burned. Binks called for survivors. No replies. No sign of Thomson, Scott, Irwin, Atherstone, or any other officer or crew member.
The only sound was the hiss of rain evaporating as it struck the smoldering wreckage of R.101.
Route of R.101’s Final Flight