The Dark Story of the R101 Airship: How a Heavy Dining Room Doomed the Empire
In 1929, nearly a thousand workers in a cathedral-sized shed in Bedfordshire were building the largest flying structure the world had ever seen — a floating palace with a dining room, lounge, promenade decks, and even a smoking room, all suspended in hydrogen. R101 was meant to carry the British Empire into the future, linking London to India in under a week. But political pressure, impossible weight margins, ignored warnings, and a cabinet minister’s Persian carpet conspired against her. On October 5, 1930, she crashed in a French hillside, killing 48 of 54 aboard — and with them, Britain’s entire airship programme. Even R100, the sister ship that actually worked, was crushed by steamrollers and sold for scrap. This is the story of ambition, engineering, and the terrible cost of flying a schedule instead of an airship.
48 Comments
At 42:48 " the nose , suddenly lighter than the tail , dropped "
Story unnecessariily stretched out. It could have been told in half the time.
42:50. I'm so sorry, the nose (bow) was suddenly HEAVIER than the tail when the gas escaped. This is why YouTube content is amateur. No fact checking, no proofreading of scripts.
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Don't need to visualise the shed, I've not only seen it but been into it. There was a four storey office building in it constructed for fire testing and it looked a bit like a shoe box. I've also been near the ridge in France where the R101 crashed. And read Neville Shute's book about the R100, built by private enterprise which worked perfectly.
Would be better without the annoying background musak.
The first queen of the skies…
This whole thing could have been 20 minutes long instead of hour and a half
The crash ultimately sounds like retaliation by oxen for all their stomachs given up
Edit : among many engineering disasters the one that stands out most is no provision for quick safe exit in emergency. Only way in or out was a single doorway on the nose which was the first to impact the ground.
I don´t believe, that the high hall – 19 min – with roof windows and massive chairs is of any airship.
A brilliant programme ruined by the thump thump bloody thump of so called bloody music
Bloody annoying "background" music can't be bothered to watch this well known story.
The hindenberg was larger, longer, you dumb AI
Design by committee, a hallmark of socialist, or craftsman movement at the time failed, and continues to this day. No tears for the loosers who should have hung on long long ropes
the story may be interresting, but I'm not able to listen to, because of that ugly idiotic sound in the background….
where did the voice go?? the music is constant volume but the voice fades away.
I want to see Napoleon as the R 101 disaster.
Most interesting and I never heard of before contrary the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg. Maybe a good topic for a movie. The Hindenburg shared the same fate as the R101 because the USA
wouldn't provide heliumgas to the Nazi-governement.Why wasn't Helium used to fill the R101? Costs?
The doors do not weigh 470 tons
So tragic. But then men knew there were risks.
Outer tubs have beenade of plastic for as long as I can remember. This is not new. Top loads do have really thin plastic. Front loads have really thick reinforced plastic that rarely has a problem. And the bearings are good now too. Top loaders are the ones that are really designed to fail fast. Their bearings don't last more than 5 years. Samsung is not bad though. Not as good as LG but better than the others. Front load is what I always recommend even from whirlpool. With Samsung and LG being better. Ge has problems with front loaders now.
At the end this guy mentions sealed compressors you can't fix! Has he ever worked on a refrigerator? All compressora are sealed and always have been. Because they have to be to function. !
Darwin Award contestants who won the prize they so desperately sought.
They knew that this airship was a death trap, but were too proud to admit it.
It’s just the scale and the luxury of the thing that fascinates me. Like a floating ocean liner. When you see a person standing beside it you get it. Trying to have all the connivances useing 1930s technology generators transformers, everything being cast iron. Such a difference from the size and weight of the stuff we have today.
You gotta love the arrogance of the British upper class.
The covering on the nose was not waterproof!
Hugo Eckener was a genius at reading the weather sky's. He must have had a sixth sense or something to fly the Graf around the world 🌎 unscathed.
I wish somebody would find a way to make it economically viable to bring these back. I've watched with awe when spotting the Goodyear blimp. A ZEPPELIN I can only imagine.
47:00 – the descripton of fuel fires doesn't even come close to describing what having 10,000 (imp) gallons of diesel catching fire would have been like – ignited by the sheer heat of the hydrogen burning. The hours of burning afterwards was almost entirely driven by that fuel. That's about the same amount as a widebody airliner – with similar flammability
The factor of an "explosion" points to hydrogen well mixed with air (Hydrogen will explode in an air mix from 18-60% concentration, but you really need to be at the high end for a visible fireball). Hindenberg's demise is a good example of a non-explosive hydrogen burn. This matters because a hydrogen explosion is noisy (detonation) but hydrogen deflagration is nearly silent. The explosion explains why so many people died (pressure wave damage) whereas only 1/3 of those on Hindenberg perished with most of those walking out of the wreckage without assistance
Shute admitted before his death that No HIghway WAS about the Comet (Hence the "reindeer tail"). The events surrounding that fiasco were why he resigned from de Havilland, emigrating to Australia and writing No HIghway whilst trying to skirt a gagging order issued under the Official Secrets Act. Shute wrote a scathing engineering report before the first Comet flew, which was essentially ignored by DH mnagement who had decided they knew better than mere engineers (the windows weren't the weakness, the riveted belts holding them in place were merely the dotted line the fuselage tore along once cracking caused by poor riveting reached them(*) – riveting that the designers didn't want, hadn't designed in and warned against (they'd intended the entire thing to be glued together, drawing on experience with the Constellation and other pressurised propellor craft and adding insult to injury they were forbdden from teaching line workers how to correctly rivet a pressurised craft together – they'd only built unpressurised up to that point, where drill burrs, bashing rivets in if they didn't fit and overtightening those rivets wasn't critical – but deadly for anything subjected to pressure cycling)
(*) Cracking failures in all cases started at the rivets near the overhead windows necessary for sextant navigation, tore down the side of the aircraft along the rivet lines joining panels, then along the window belt rivet lines in a few milliseconds. Blaming "the windows" was De Havilland's way of avoiding admitting that they had modified a safe design to be intrinsically unsafe because management conservatism and habit overrode engineering reaearch. Engineers had realised rivets are dangerous in a pressurised aircraft and did away with them in favour of a slightly thicker skin and adhesive. DH management decisions added a lot of weight and thousands of stress cracking sources.
R101 and Comet are both examples of why Britain "failed" – although that failure was locked in long before WW1 by Imperial mindsets.. Poor management doomed them and that tale keeps repeating. They weren't the first or last such disasters and won't be in future.
Here's one very important factor: Unions. If there is "union trouble" then it always means that management is rotten. Unions don't get uppity if workers are happy. Happy workers who are treated well, listened to and not told to press on regardless with substandard equipment/dangerous tasks don't tolerate union firebrands – and as we've seen with Boeing in North Carolina you don't solve those issues by banning unions (B787 and B737 manufacturing issues caused by line manmagement refusing to acknowledge safty issues, sometimes fishing defective parts out of bins and forcing them to be used anyway) – demonstrating that the same path Britain went down is a tale repeated across time and nations when governments or corporations become complacent/more concerned witrh prestige/profit than doing things right.
Investors need to realise that if there are serious union problems arising, then the company might be profitable in the short term but in the long term it's probably doomed even with massive government subsidies. Focussing on short term profits makes companies act in manners which if they were human would be called sociopathic and this consequently attracts /rewards sociopaths in management (See: Enron, Rupert Maxwell, etc)
Unprofessional production.
What a ridiculous drawn out Ai CONTENT… ABOUT 10 minutes of actual content. So ridiculous. 👎👎👎👎👎
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now do it with none flammable helium ?
So they even included a 260 lb Ships Bell.. Could have learned alot from the Germans
Nevile Shute……A brilliant writer and clever engineer! Underated in my opinion…..Or is it that through the passage of time humanity has forgotten him?
The smiking room has a skylight ?
Aluminium? 😂
Somewhere in my library I have an engineering book about how to build a dirigible. I’m going to need a bigger garage.
R 101 labour government's project SAYS IT ALL. Neary 100 yrs later n wd have starmacunt n co.
So the noses lighter than the tale dropped, mm. Surely it should RISE.
18:28 a sealed mesothelioma inducing capsule that you pay astronomical amounts of money for. Lol
If the nose became lighter, it would rise. Who does the tech editing for these videos?
42:50 if the nose was lighter than the tail why would it drop lower than the tail? Were Einstein's E=MC², and Newton's law of gravity not "invented" yet?
49:00 so he was awarded someone's wife? Not to bad i guess
Hindenburg, Titanic, R101, Donald Campbell's Bluebird………………….I am SO LOOKING FORWARD to the manned mission to Mars…………………….and I'm here to tell you – I WON'T BE ABOARD.
In some ways it's like the Concorde that nobody wanted but British Airways had to just "keep it going" to pretend it was a huge success.
The ridiculous generic background music is very annoying. Who chose the background music for this video, Helen Keller? This story could have been told in half the time.
Ai Slop. First half was alright. Then the narrative drones on and on and on. Like a mandatory word count met successfully through repetition of previously mentioned details.
Socialist ruin everything they touch. They don’t pay attention to reality. They fly on pink clouds.
I wasn't able to read Nevil Shute. I was more into Alistair Maclean and his highly improbable stories and Sven Hassel who wrote tragic comic war stories.
I've been. to those sheds awsome