His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine

By S. C. Gwynne

Categories: History

S. C. Gwynne chronicles R101, the hydrogen-filled airship that Britain built in the 1920s under its Imperial Airship Scheme, alongside the privately built R100, to bind the empire together by air. Larger than any flying machine before it, R101 was rushed into service under political pressure from the Air Minister, Lord Thomson. On October 5, 1930, on its first overseas flight, bound for India, it crashed in France near Beauvais and burned, killing 48 of the 54 people aboard.

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