Airship R-100 Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The R.100 was an airship, the successful private counterpart to the British government R-101 project, in a competition designed to highlight the so-called benefits of state controlled "Big Science" projects (cf Concorde )Constructed at the former RNAS Station at Howden in Yorkshire, the Vickers-built competitor flew to Cardington on its maiden flight in the morning of 16 December, 1916. At the huge {surviving} hangars in Bedfordshire England, two teams, the other led by the Air Ministry, competed to prove their impressive craft capable of flying from the UK to India.
As with the later Concorde, the goal to eventually offer a regular and comfortable trans-Atlantic service. Soon after 1920, Vickers' experts had calculated that the fare on an airship journey might be £45 in comparison with a contemporary airliner fare of £115 and that the non-stop range of an airship would be far superior, making the journey times by the alternative modes quite competitive.
As part of its trials the R.100 made a trans-Atlantic trip to Canada in July 1930 averaging 42 mph. The swifter return flight, in 58 rather than 78 hours, began on 13 August reaching Cardington on 16 August 1930. It could carry 100 passengers at 80 mph (128 km/h).
When the R.101 crashed and burned because of its poor design and excess weight the Air Ministry ordered all R.100 flights to be stopped. Despite the quality of its design and the proven excellence of its flight-handling, the government decided to sell the R.100 for scrap in November 1931.
The Vickers R.100 team, known as the Airship Guarantee Company, included Nevil Shute, as a stress engineer, and one of the finest aircraft engineers in history, Sir Barnes Wallis.
The tale of the design of the R.100 and its superiority to the R.101 is told with great clarity in Shute's Slide Rule: the autobiography of an engineer, which was first published in 1954.
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