R101 portrait 2011

The R101 Disaster
The R101 Disaster
Back in October 2010 the Newsletter folder was looking slimmer than usual, so I put out a
request for items. Amongst others, Jim Prettyman put me in touch with a friend of his, Euan
Murray.
Jim and Euan had been out to the Museum of Flight that summer to look for two models that
Euan's father had made in the 1930s and which had been on display at Chambers Street for
many years, but were now part of the reserve collection. I featured the model of DH 60 Moth
G-EBNO in the December 2010 issue and the second model was of the R101 airship. A
fascinating story about this was about to reveal itself.
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The R101 Disaster
J. Balfour Murray ARAeS was an important
aeronautical engineer in Scotland at the time.
His war service was spent managing an
aircraft components factory at Donibristle
in Fife and he introduced many innovations
to dramatically speed up the servicing of
aero engines.
Like most engineers he enjoyed a practical
challenge. When the R101 crashed on its
maiden flight to India in 1930 there was a
Board of Inquiry but the results were somewhat woolly. Jack Murray had a habit of
picking away at a problem until he had
worked out what went wrong so to satisfy
his curiosity he carried out his own research
and even built an accurate model of the
airship. This model was to take on a special
significance as it is the only one in the world
showing all the modifications that had been
put in place at the time of the accident.
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The R101 Disaster
So what actually caused the R101 to come down? Peter Masefield devoted years to the
problem and wrote about this in 'To Ride the Storm'. Group Captain Ernest Johnston, son of
the R 101’s navigator, wrote about the disaster in ‘Airship Navigator’ and in the 1980s
Bristol University ran computer simulations. Neville Shute put forward his opinions in
‘Slide Rule’ and 'Aeroplane' magazine had an excellent short article recently in the November
2010 issue.
At the risk of over-simplifying, the current theory is that as R101 ploughed through the rain
and wind near Beauvais, less than eight hours after leaving Cardington and heading for its
half way stop at Ismailia in Egypt, a tear in the nose fabric started. As it grew, the
aerodynamics were compromised and the nose started to take on water, leading to a slow but
inevitable descent.
It touched the ground at about 12 mph or so and the accident should have been survivable if
the hydrogen had not caught fire. Hydrogen by itself will extinguish a flame, surprisingly,
but when mixed with oxygen it becomes highly combustible. Hydrogen from damaged gas
bags mixed inside the outer envelope with the air recently forced in through the nose. Still
all should have been well as for safety reasons the engines were all diesels, but fire was
started by either sparks from the small Ricardo petrol engines used as starter motors, a
compromise to save weight, or by the ignition of calcium flares stored in the control cabin
when the airship hit the ground. Of 55 on board 48 were lost.
This was not just the end of one airship but the end of all airships in Britain and the sense of
devastation and disappointment amongst everyone involved must have been great. They
were not the evolutionary dead end we think of today, they were within a whisper of
developing into something really useful and about to achieve great things. R 101 was one of
two airships, built to the same requirements but by competing design teams. It was an
important project and almost everyone you can think of who was connected with aviation at
the time was involved with the R 100 or the R 101, including Hugh Dowding. He was soon
to be the mastermind of the country’s defence during the Battle of Britain but for now he was
the one who signed off the R 101 as fit for flight, though he later admitted he did it with much
anxiety and under great pressure from above.
Euan has let us see his father's original correspondence, and this appears on the next few
pages. It is compact and anticipates clearly the modern view of events, and I have reproduced it as facsimile because of the wonderful period feel.
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Reunited
Euan Murray, Jack Murray’s son, was reunited in the summer of 2010 with his father’s fine
model of the R 101 at the Museum of Flight. Thanks to Euan and to Jim Prettyman for all
their help in producing this article.
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The R101 Disaster
Finally, Kenneth Watkins, a friend of Jim’s from his days at de Havillands, has recently
visited the monument at the site in France of the R 101’s crash, and he sends this photograph.
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