Nobody who was in the control car of R101 survived, and no report of her last trial flight was ever found. What is known of her last night comes from three kinds of record, and the inquiry wove them together: the wireless messages she sent to Cardington and the direction-finding stations, the evidence of the six survivors and the statement of a seventh man who died, and the observations of people on the ground in France. This is that account, kept to what the records say.
The afternoon
The Meteorological Office at Cardington sent the captain its first forecast at nine minutes past nine on the morning of Saturday 4 October 1930. A shallow depression off Tynemouth was moving away north-east; another was coming in from the Atlantic. For the flight from Cardington to the south of France between five that evening and five the next morning the upper wind at 2,000 feet would be from between 260 and 240 degrees, “20 to 30 m.p.h.”, with cloud at times down to a thousand feet. At half past nine Major Scott, Flight Lieutenant Irwin and Mr Giblett went through the charts together in the forecast room. At three minutes past three a further report said the front had passed east over France, a trough was spreading in quickly from west of Ireland, rain would probably reach Cardington that night, and the wind at 2,000 feet over northern France would still be twenty to thirty miles an hour. On those reports, Colonel Moore-Brabazon wrote in his note for the inquiry, “no great increase in wind velocity was to be expected over the South of England and Northern France during the evening and night”.
The barometer was falling all the same. An hour before the ship was due to leave Scott came down from her and said he was going to get all the passengers on board early, as he wished if possible to get away before the original starting time. A correspondent of Flight who had spent the afternoon at the tower watched Lord Thomson drive up at about half past six with his valet and luggage and pose for the photographers. “All seemed confident and cheerful, and their happy faces contrasted with the gloomy looks of the spare members of the crew who had not been selected for the voyage.” By seven, summer time, everyone was aboard and the gangway closed. A floodlight lit the ship’s silver belly, and a yellow glow in the dining-room windows showed that the passengers were at dinner: “only a cold dinner to-night,” an official told him with a grin. The new heavy-oil starting engine in the starboard forward car would not start at first and held things up.
She carried about twenty-five tons of fuel oil, ten of them in tanks that could be jettisoned from the control car in three seconds, and had taken on nine and a quarter tons of water ballast, of which four went over the side at the tower to compensate for the weight of the people aboard and help her rise. Squadron Leader Booth, captain of R100, who saw her off, judged her about half a ton light. There were fifty-four on board: six passengers, six officials of the Royal Airship Works, five officers and thirty-seven crew.
Six thirty-six
She slipped the tower at 6.36 by Greenwich time, 7.36 by the clocks, and a cheer went up from a crowd the Flight man found hard to believe had all been given passes. “The heavily laden airship did not rise smartly above the head of the tower.” Irwin let the wind blow her gently backwards, lifted her nose, and took her away over Bedford, where a drizzle began that grew heavier as the correspondent drove back to London.
Before she reached London the main oil pressure failed on the engine in the after car. Joe Binks and Arthur Bell, the engineers in charge of it, with the chief engineer, William Gent, and Harry Leech, the foreman engineer from Cardington, worked on it until about eleven o’clock, when it ran again. Over Hitchin Leech, who had been in her on earlier trials, noticed that she was pitching and rolling more than before and said so to Squadron Leader Rope, who had noticed too and did not seem worried. She climbed to her pressure height of about a thousand feet and then to 1,500, which meant that about three tons of gas went out through her valves.
At 8.21 she signalled: “Over London. All well. Moderate rain. Base of low clouds 1,500 feet. Wind 240 degrees, 25 m.p.h. Course now set for Paris. Intend to proceed via Paris, Tours, Toulouse and Narbonne.”
At 8.08 Cardington had already sent her something else. The six o’clock chart showed the trough moving east, and the forecast for the next twelve hours over south-east England, the Channel and northern France was now a wind at 2,000 feet “from about 240 degrees 40 to 50 m.p.h. Much low cloud with rain.” It was, Moore-Brabazon wrote, “a velocity which no British airship had met with over land before.” The weather had deteriorated faster than the science of the day could predict. “Had it been possible to do so, and had such information been available two hours earlier, it is doubtful whether the decision to start would ever have been taken.”
At 9.47 she reported: “At 2135 G.M.T. crossing coast in vicinity of Hastings. It is raining hard and there is a strong South-westerly wind. Cloud base is at 1,500 feet. After a good get-away from the Mooring Tower at 1830 hours ship circled Bedford before setting course. Course was set for London at 1854. Engines running well at cruising speed giving 54.2 knots. Reached London at 2000 hours and then set course for Paris. Gradually increasing height so as to avoid high land. Ship is behaving well generally and we have already begun to recover water ballast.” The last clause mattered to the inquiry. Rain was being caught on her back to make up for the weight of fuel burned, and a ship that was catching water did not think herself heavy.
The Channel
The crossing to the mouth of the Somme, nearly sixty miles, took two hours against the wind. Leech, helping with the after engine, thought from the whitecaps that she was at seven or eight hundred feet. Alf Cook, in the port midship car, looked out several times and saw the waves “being lashed up”; she seemed to him very low, and he noticed that she several times sank and climbed again. About ten o’clock Arthur Disley, the electrician, went into the wireless cabin beside the control car and heard Lieutenant-Commander Atherstone, the first officer, speak to the height coxswain at the elevator wheel. Atherstone took the wheel himself, with the altimeter at nine hundred feet, pulled her up to a thousand, and handed it back with the words “Do not let her go below 1,000 feet.” Squadron Leader Johnston, the navigator, was dropping calcium flares into the sea to measure her drift, which may be why she had been allowed down.
At 11.36 she reported: “Crossing French coast at Pointe de St. Quentin. Wind 245 true 35 m.p.h.” It was the right landfall for the airway to Paris, which Johnston had flown many times. The inquiry later thought her wind reports too low, since at cruising speed she should have gone further in the time; the Meteorological Office worked out afterwards that at 1,500 feet between the French coast and Beauvais the wind was about forty-six miles an hour, from a little south of south-west.
At 11 p.m. the watch had changed. The men who came on then would stay on until two.
Midnight
At eighteen minutes past twelve Cardington took down her midnight position:
“2400 GMT. 15 miles S.W. of Abbeville. Average speed 33 knots. Wind 243 degrees (i.e., W.S.W.), 35 miles per hour. Altimeter height 1,500 feet. Air temperature 51° Fahrenheit. Weather—intermittent rain. Cloud nimbus at 500 feet.
“After an excellent supper our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar and having sighted the French coast have now gone to bed to rest after the excitement of their leave-taking. All essential services are functioning satisfactorily. The crew have settled down to watch-keeping routine.”
About one o’clock she passed to the west of the aerodrome at Poix, halfway between Abbeville and Beauvais. The man in charge there, M. Maillet, saw a line of white lights, too far off to make out her shape or her red side light, and had “an impression that she was struggling very hard against the wind.” About the same time Irwin came into the smoking room and spoke to Leech and Gent. He said nothing about the ship except that the after engine was still running satisfactorily. Gent turned in. Leech went round all five engine cars, found them running well, and came back to the smoking room, where he sat alone.
Her last signal to Cardington was at 1.28, a test of signal strength. At a quarter to two Le Bourget and Valenciennes took cross-bearings on her and worked out a position a kilometre north of the landing ground at Beauvais; Le Bourget sent it to her at 1.51, and at 1.52 she acknowledged it. The inquiry thought she was probably some kilometres further north than that, since the bearings did not give a clean cut, but the point was that she was in full communication, and that she had asked for nothing and reported nothing wrong. At 2.44 by summer time, Croydon overheard her asking Le Bourget for her position; at 3.16 Le Bourget broadcast: “G.F.A.A.W. a pris feu.”
Two o’clock
At two the watch changed, in the ordinary way. The inquiry made much of this. Had the captain known at that hour of any serious trouble he would not have let the men going off duty turn in; he would have ordered them to stand by, and the men coming on would have heard of it. None of the survivors heard of any such order. Whatever was wrong at two o’clock, nobody in the control car yet knew it.
People in Beauvais woken by her engines went out into a storm of rain and wind and saw her pass low to the east of the town, labouring in gusts. More than one of them saw the row of lights along her side go out for a while, which no rolling would explain; the inquiry supposed a cloud between.
Binks was due to relieve Bell in the after car at two. He walked aft along the keel from the crew’s quarters through frames 8, 8a, 9 and 10 into frame 11, about a hundred and fifty feet; had the ship already been pointing steeply down he would have known it. He climbed into the car at three minutes past two by his watch. Bell, who was standing at the engineer’s post waiting to be relieved, said he was late, and stayed to say so, which is why Bell lived. Just after Binks arrived the ship put her nose down and began a dive that both men put at not much more than thirty seconds.
Cook had relieved Blake in the port midship car at two; Blake told him everything was all right and left. About five minutes later Cook felt the ship take up “a slight diving attitude”. Victor Savory, who had taken the starboard midship car from Hasting at two, remembered only one dip, sharp enough to throw him back against the starting engine. Disley was asleep in his bunk beside the switchboard, lying with his head towards the bow, and the first dive woke him. Leech, alone in the smoking room amidships, saw a siphon and glasses slide off the table on to the floor and found himself sliding along the settee into the forward bulkhead. He first said the dive lasted forty-five seconds, then thought fifteen or twenty before she began to straighten.
She came level, for ten seconds by Binks’s reckoning and five by Bell’s. Leech picked up the siphon and the glasses and put them back on the table, which had slid down against the bulkhead too. Disley, still in his bunk, felt her come out of the dive and thought for a moment she was nose up. In those seconds the chief coxswain, George Hunt, came aft from the control car past Disley’s bunk towards the crew’s space and said, “We’re down, lads.”
Then several things happened at once. The engine-room telegraphs rang. Each car had its own, and the orders took some seconds to pass round, but the bells were heard, and in the after car the order “slow” was received and carried out before the car touched the ground. Cook’s rang too; he slowed his engine, and as he did so the ship went into a second, steeper dive, and he looked out of the car door, because an order to slow after so many hours at cruising speed meant that something serious was happening. Savory saw no signal; the noise in a power car drowned the bell, and his engine was still at cruising speed. Disley got a hand to the switchboard and tripped one of the two field switches, “because he knew that in any aircraft crash there might be a chance of fire.” There was no time for the second, and with two generators running the current in the fore part of the ship was still on when she struck. Somewhere forward a rigger, Samuel Church, walking back from the change of watch, “received an order to release an emergency forward water ballast (½ ton) but before I could get to it the crash came.” That half ton was in the nose and could only be let go by hand; the ballast the control car could drop had largely gone at the tower.
Leech felt the nose go down again and heard the telegraphs; he thought the second dive slightly less steep than the first. A few seconds later the ship struck. “There was no very violent jar; the striking was more of a ‘crunch.’” The lights in the smoking room went out, and within a second there was a flash of flame. The ceiling came down on the settee and held him, and he got out by tearing the partition apart with his hands. Cook saw the main body of the ship strike as he looked out, stopped his engines, and felt a second crash and an explosion together. Binks said his car did not strike heavily but bumped along the ground until the bottom caved in. Water from a ballast tank fell on the after car and drenched Binks and Bell, which, Flight reported, helped to save them. Savory remembered “rumbling and crashing and things breaking” and a vivid flash through the open door that scorched his face and blinded him.
On the ground
A man named Rabouille, who worked in a button factory by day and was out snaring rabbits that night about 250 metres away, heard three explosions and saw the ship light up from the fore part. She had struck with the underside of her bow at an angle the wreckage put at between fifteen and twenty-five degrees. The starboard forward propeller was still turning when it hit, and that car was twisted completely round. She slid about sixty feet and came to rest with her bow in a wood of small trees and her stern in a meadow, having crumpled by eighty-eight feet. The fire ran her whole length in moments but died before it had consumed her tail, and fabric remained on the underside of the port elevator. Cook, walking a few yards into the wood and looking back, saw the elevators standing upright in the light of the flames. The turns of wire left on the drum of the elevator wheel in the control car, and on the auxiliary drum, confirmed it: the height coxswain had put the elevators hard up and they were hard up when she struck.
The inquiry’s three phases follow from these facts. A first long dive, checked by hard up-elevator. A few seconds level in which, “in spite of her utmost efforts”, she could not get her nose up again, which a ship in a normal condition would have done, and which can only mean that she had lost so much gas forward that she was already going down. Then the orders to slow the engines and drop the nose ballast, to soften the blow, and the second dive. Hugo Eckener of the Zeppelin company, who came over to give evidence, said the new coxswain would have had to “feel his way” into the condition of a ship that was probably three or four tons heavy and a little heavy by the nose, and that in a gust he might not have met the first movement at once; the violence of the dive, Eckener thought, tore wider a rent in a forward gasbag that was already leaking. Booth, who had thought until he heard Eckener that something must have happened at 1,500 feet, came to think that the dive itself might have done the damage. Where the gas went first “can never be definitely ascertained.”
Six men got out of the wreck alive: Leech, who went back into the burning hull for Disley and was given the Albert Medal for it; Disley, badly burned on the hands, who walked to a telephone and told the Air Ministry at four in the morning what had happened; Binks, Bell, Cook and Savory from the engine cars. Church and a rigger named Radcliffe were pulled out alive and died in the hospital at Beauvais, Church on the following Wednesday, after giving the statement quoted above. Forty-six died where she lay. The watches of some of the crew had stopped at 2.10, Greenwich time.