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Aviation History
1950
1950 - 1054.PDF
FLIGHT, i June 1950 if " piWtt aph. Bamboo forest: Dr. Barton's airship under construction in 1903-05. The Willows Co. built five successful airships ; one is shown above. DIRIGIBLE INTO DODO? . . , r posed round the car on all sides. The mechanical com- plexity and consequent aerodynamic interference must have been considerable; however, a successful flight was made. Much subsequent development in Britain was due to the work of Willows. The third of his airships, with an old aeroplane fuselage slung underneath, formed the nucleus of the several-hundred-strong force of coastal patrol airships built up by Britain during the first world war. A few rigid airships were constructed in Britain, but they were not wholly satisfactory—the first of them, the Mayfly (a short-lived summer insect), was too heavy to lift itself— and it was not until engineers were able to examine the structure of a Zeppelin shot down in a raid over England in 1916 that a reliable rigid airship came to be designed. This was to become the R.33. The next design, the R.34, was the first airship to cross the Atlantic. During prepara- tions to land in America, some trouble was experienced: there was no one on the ground able to direct the landing operations, so a member of the crew parachuted down, and after quieting the spectators, recruited, a makeshift ground crew hastily instructed in the art of securing a giant airship. In 1928, when the Graf Zeppelin paid a visit to the United States, the German airmen experienced the irreverance of the native character. News spread around that the over- due Zeppelin was holed in the stabilizer, and a large audi- ence gathered at Lakehurst, in New Jersey, in the gleeful expectation of witnessing a close-up of the prang. The scene was described by James Thurber in a contemporary issue of The New Yorker. A company of marines was detailed to assist in the landing, but the crowd milling in confusion over the landing field rendered operations hazard- ous. To a call for quiet to let the landing crew hear the orders, the crowd responded with tooting on motor horns. A captain of marines appealed to the crowd to behave: " Put out your cigarettes, cigars, pipes— " he shouted. The crowd took up the refrain, "—chocolates, popcorn, Coco- Cola . . .," it chanted, stirring up the dry earth of the field in a cyclone of dust, in which, eventually, the Zep- pelin came down. The crowd burst through the sweating ranks of marines and surged towards the airship, to gather what souvenirs it could from the wreckage; but the airship was undamaged, and the disappointed crowd dispersed. And so we must leave the subject. If the writer were less honest than he professes to be, he might conclude his obituary (after reciting the series of calamities that dark- ened the declining years) in the customary manner, relat- ing, with a hint of tears in his voice, how the airship was untimely snatched from our midst at the beginning of a career of great promise; but as he is truthful he will acknowledge to be relieved that he was not bom till the aeroplane came. After all, who would lumber along on a hippopotamus when he may have a thoroughbred for his ride? To take, another analogy. The aeroplane is like a Channel swimmer stripped for action, while the airship is like a non-swimmer wrapped from head to foot with cork- jackets and air-bladders. The airship was much too big for what it had to carry; this, perhaps, was its undoing. A thousand houses may burn to the ground in a day, and escape notice, but you cannot topple over the Empire State Building and keep it out of the papers; which is why air- ship crashes always hit the headlines; and bad headlines, as everyone knows, are bad for business. And there the writer will presume no further on the for- bearance of the reader, and leave the subject finally. ,,-••.. ••••-•- -:..•• -• - •- M. N. M. The Graf Zeppelin matte commercial crossings of the South Atlantic She is seen here during a visit to Han worth inJ93Z.
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