Chapter CXXI: Inflated Opinions.
The evocative name chosen by the media, ‘The Race to Buenos Aires’, conjured up images of men and machine locked in a battle for speed. Indeed the contest was regularly compared to the famed ‘Blue Riband’ for trans-Atlantic crossings, a title that had moved between four ships, from four different nations, between 1933 and 1936. This was however not a particularly good comparison, the challenge of getting a liner across the Atlantic had been solved for over a century at that time while Alcock and Brown had only completed the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight in 1919. Indeed Zeppelins aside there were no regular trans-Atlantic passenger flights in service in the early 1930s; merely getting a passenger aircraft across the Atlantic would be an achievement, the time taken was relatively unimportant.
The seemingly obvious option for those wishing to challenge the German Zeppelins was another dirigible, but that was not as simple as it may first appear. Before we enter the world of dirigibles a clearing up of terminology will be useful. A dirigible is any powered and steerable lighter than aircraft, a rigid airship has a structural frame and coating to provide the shape of the craft whereas a blimp has no such frame or coating and it’s shape is provided by the pressure of the lifting gas. There was also the half way house of the semi-rigid airship which still relied on the lifting gases to maintain shape but had a reinforced keel to try and provide the same strength at a lower weight. A Zeppelin was therefore a type of rigid airship and it should be clear why only a rigid, or at least semi-rigid, airships were thought suitable for the rigours of long distance travel, though as we shall see merely possessing a rigid frame or a reinforced keel was no guarantee of stability, strength or safety.
The key problem with dirigibles was that while all the great powers, and several not so great, had at some point had an airship programme, they had almost uniformly not gone well. In Britain there was a certain macabre symmetry to the problems, both the first (His Majesty’s Airship No.1) and the last (the R.101) airships suffered severe structural failures. But where HMA No.1, merely broke her back while on the ground (and so never managed to even take off) the R.101 crashed during a storm while on a flight to Karachi, taking with it the then Air Minister and the Director of Civil Aviation. In the twenty years between those two disasters very little had been achieved by airships, the simpler and cheaper blimps proving far more effective, so unsurprisingly the airship programme was cancelled soon after the R.101 disaster. In the United States the problems were if anything worse, out of the five rigid airships that were assigned registration numbers by the US Navy, two broke up in bad weather (the USS
Shenandoah and USS
Akron), one suffered catastrophic structural failure and ditched in the Pacific (USS
Marcon) and one didn’t even survive long enough to get a name, crashing and bursting into flames during initial testing (the R-38/ZR-2). Interestingly the only one to survive, the USS
Los Angeles, had been built in Germany by the Zeppelin Company as part of Germany’s Treaty of Versailles war reparations. This was of no real help to her as she was decommissioned and dismantled when the USN abandoned the programme, deciding that maritime reconnaissance would be better carried out by aircraft than airships. The US Army’s record wasn’t much better, the US built Goodyear RS-1 failed to meet any of her design targets but did at least survive to be dismantled, unlike her predecessor the Italian built
Roma which collided with high voltage pylons during acceptance testing and crashed in flames.
His Majesty’s Airship 23r with attached parasite fighter, in this case a RNAS 2F.1 Sopwith Camel, at the 1918 experimental trials. The first experimentations with parasite aircraft were carried out by the German Navy Airship Command in late 1917, the plan being that attached Albatross D.III fighters could provide the Zeppelins with a defensive fighter escort. As there was no plan for any ‘hook’ or similar to allow the D.IIIs to ‘land’ on the Zeppelins any D.III pilot that launched was expected to covertly land in the UK, avoid capture and somehow cross the Channel to return back to Germany. Unsurprisingly the plan never advanced beyond proof of concept trials over Germany. The British trials shown above were slightly more ambitious, as were the early USN experiments, as both nations worked to develop the capability to launch, recover and refuel aircraft from airships. While both countries abandoned the defensive fighter idea, deeming airships (even helium filled ones) inherently indefensible in the face of any opposition, the USN went on to work on the ‘flying aircraft carrier’ concept, using the airship as a base for recognisance fighters to extend the eyes of the fleet. The tragic crashes of the first two ‘carrier’ airships, the massive Akron and Macon, and the rapid development of both land and carrier based aircraft, combined to kill the concept off in the mid-1930s
The Italian airship programme itself was effectively ended after the
Italia disaster over the Arctic, returning from the North Pole the
Italia crashed into the ice and was the subject of a heroic but tragic international rescue effort that claimed more lives than the original crash. In France, despite a long history of dirigibles that easily rivalled that of Germany, the airship had fallen out of fashion after the Great War as successive government looked to the aeroplane not the airship. This process had only accelerated after the loss of the
Dixmude (another ex-German war reparation) in a storm over the Mediterranean, an accident that took with the French military’s senior airship officers and with it the last vestiges of military support for airships. This left only two serious programmes still in operation; the Soviets and the Germans. While the Soviets had suffered their own string of disasters, losing no fewer than four airships to crashes in less than three years, with a national leadership practically indifferent to losses this had not stopped the programme. In contrast the Zeppelin company had continued to lead a charmed life, provided one ignored the failures of German built airships in foreign service and the string of wartime accidents. At the time there was a tendency in Germany to view this as proof of their superior understanding of airships and aerial technology, alas hindsight tells us that they had in fact merely been lucky and that their luck would not hold.
With the dirigible route closed the challenge to the Zeppelins would have to come from an aircraft and this would not be an easy task. The direct distance between London and Buenos Aires is some 7,000 miles; in 1937 the world distance record for a non-stop flight by an aircraft was barely 6,300 miles, and that set by a specially built and stripped down experimental prototype. Shifting two dozen passengers across the Atlantic would prove to be a completely different challenge.
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Short(ish) and barely a week after the last update. What more could anyone ask for? Apart from advancing the plot of course. But Zeppelins! Airships! Lots of firey crashes! That has to be worth a few alt-history points surely.
All crashes are historic as 1920s/30s airships really were that bad, even the helium filled ones (all the US ones bar the ZR-2 and
Roma were helium filled.). Of course aircraft were also crashing all over the place, and there was perhaps a more 'relaxed' attitude to fatal crashes at the time, but even so I'm slightly amazed that people kept pursuing the concept when it kept going so badly wrong. As one would expect it was the Soviets who kept going the longest, till well into the 50s/60s by some accounts, which I can only explain by the leadership just not being bothered by all the crashes.
OK so the next update will be on the aircraft that will be racing to Buenos Aries, which I hope to get posted before the World Cup finishes in real time, and then we will be ready for Spain*/South America* (* delete as democratically determined).