Image by the Royal Aeronautical Society In this short video, Bill Hammack, an engineer and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, details the extraordinary making and tragic ending of the British airship known as R101. Conceived in 1924 and first flown in 1929, R101 was intended to fly a regular route from England to India. Hammack uses archival images and his own deep research to trace the engineering and history of this remarkable vessel, which the British government planned as the flagship of a fleet that would criss-cross its then-sprawling empire.
Those ambitious plans were abandoned after the airship crashed in France in October 1930, killing 48 of the 54 people on board. Hammack offers a riveting peek into a brief moment in aviation history – one ended for good by the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937 – when it appeared as if commercial airships might become a regular sight in skies across the world. The video accompanies Hammack’s book Fatal Flight: The True Story of Britain’s Last Great Airship (2017), which is available as a free audiobook at his website.
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