Titanic of the skies: The forgotten story of an airship disaster

The very idea that aeroplanes might be used for long-haul flights would have been laughable to people at the time, says Cecilia Thornton, author of the newly-released book Airship of Dreams.

“They didn’t have the materials or the technology to build great big jet airliners that we have today. Also, aeroplanes required runways, whereas airships didn’t, and they needed to be refuelled,” she says. “Very often they had to do short hops – so for international travel, they were quite awkward and cramped, and they couldn’t carry a lot. On the other hand, the people were familiar with ocean liners, and perhaps in their mind, an airship closely resembled that – a lot of the airship terminology is ocean terminology: port and starboard, et cetera.

“Airships were seen as an ocean liner of the sky – you would sit in a nice dining room, looking out over the scenery and the landscape passing below as a steward served you a beautiful meal on the china that was specially designed for the airship. It would kind of float majestically through the sky; you could walk around, you could dance, they had a dance floor. They had luxury everywhere – and it was just considered obvious that this was how long-distance travel was going to be, as compared to being in a tiny little box or a little tube of an aeroplane with very little room that had to stop every now and again to get more fuel on board.”

And yet, by the late 1930s, the airship was consigned to the dustbin of history after a string of well-publicised disasters. The most famous these days is the Hindenburg, which dramatically went up in flames in New Jersey in 1936; however, it was an earlier calamity, the crash of the R101 in France six years prior, that destroyed the British airship industry – and left an indelible mark on Cecilia Thornton’s family at the same time.

From office clerk to war hero

What made Cecilia – up until now known mainly for fantasy novels – write a book about an airship disaster? The answer is her grandfather, Will Palstra, a prominent figure in the early Australian air forces and a passenger on the R101’s first – and last – intercontinental flight.

“He was one of Australia’s first air force pilots. In 1918, he joined the Australian Flying Corps, flying a variety of biplanes, including Avros, Sopwith Pups, Sopwith Camels, R.E.8s and S.E.5s,” she says. “His job was to fly pretty low over enemy lines, so that he could distinguish the uniform colours. Which ones were our guys and which ones were their guys? The uniform colours were pretty close – one was khaki and one was steel grey – so he had to go pretty low, he was often fired upon. We have some shrapnel that he sent home which had been lodged in the back of his seat as he was flying one of his aeroplanes. It didn’t get shot down, he survived it.

Will wouldn’t have been the first person you suspected of being a daring Air Force pilot, says Cecilia – a “modest but ambitious” man with a Salvation Army background, he worked as a clerk before enlisting in World War 1, and returned for a while to clerical work after coming home before a chance encounter sent him back to the skies.

“It was all very nine-to-five office work, very different from his life in the army and the Air Force, and I suspect he missed that greatly,” she says. “One day, by chance, he happened to meet his old comrade [Air Marshal Richard] ‘Dicky’ Williams, who was very high up in the Air Force at the time. I think they might have met on the train or somewhere in town, and they got to talking about the good old times, roaring around in the sky getting shot at and having a lot of excitement.

“And Dicky Williams, who’s quite a heroic figure in the history of the RAAF, he said, ‘well, why don’t you come back? We need experienced pilots like you who can teach the young ones. We’re starting up this thing called the RAAF at Point Cook, and we need teachers and we need recruiters, and we’ll give you a good salary.’ My grandfather didn’t need much encouragement.”

Will rose quickly through the ranks of the RAAF to become a squadron leader, and after being sent on assignment to London, was appointed as the RAAF’s liaison to the British Air Ministry. It was in this role that a unique opportunity arose for him.

“He wasn’t involved in the airship industry, but he was chosen after the war to be among a limited number of six VIP passengers aboard the maiden international flight of the R101 British airship, which was very new at the time. It was also the largest airship in the world at the time at 777 feet long,” says Cecilia.

Voyage to disaster

On 4 October 1930, His Majesty’s Airship R101 was slated to make its first epic journey: a voyage to Karachi in India, with a refuelling stop at Ismaila on the Suez Canal in Egypt. It carried 48 crew and only six passengers, including RAAF Squadron Leader William Palstra; Lord Thomson of Cardington, who was the British Secretary of State for Air; and Air Vice-Marshal Sir Sefton Brancker, Britain’s Director of Civil Aviation.

The R101 would never even make it to Egypt. Battling strong winds and driving rain across the English Channel, the airship was near Beauvais in the north of France when it entered a shallow dive. While it recovered, the reprieve was only temporary: the R101 went down moments later, hitting the ground in a crash that very likely would have been survivable – had the airship not immediately burst into flames.

“A lot of people know about the tragedy of the Hindenburg, because that was captured on film, but the R101 would have been equally spectacular if it had been captured on film, and at the time, the R101 tragedy made headlines around the world,” Cecilia says.

In her book, Cecilia relates the “crashing roar” that resounded across the valley as 5.5 million cubic feet of flammable hydrogen – which was used in most airships at the time, as helium, while safer, was much rarer, more expensive, and provided less lift – ignited in a horrific conflagration.

“It shook the nearby village of Allonne to its foundations and shattered windows. Sheets of flame towered into the sky,” she writes. “The furnace that was once an airship lit up the countryside with a ghastly yellow light, like some nightmarish sun, night turning to day. People in the vicinity of Beauvais were awakened by the thunder. On rushing to the windows, they saw streaks of light soaring across the sky. Next day, all that could be seen was a massive tangle of scorched metal. The twisted, burnt and charred framework was all that remained of the glorious R101. She had been completely destroyed by fire. Forty-eight men perished out of a total of fifty-four passengers and crew.”

Theories abound as to why the R101 met its fate on that stormy night – the airship certainly was heavier than it was supposed to be, with raindrops all over its vast envelope weighing it down, coupled with extra cargo that had been ill-advisedly brought on board (not to mention Lord Thomson’s valet, who was definitely not meant to be on the flight).

According to Cecilia, the consensus is that the R101 had also not been tested thoroughly enough, with Lord Thomson rushing the airship into service so he could make the trip to a conference in India and fuel his ambition of becoming viceroy.

“People are still going through the records to this day. And probing the reasons why it happened,” she says. “There are ideas such as it lost height, and then when it touched the ground, there could have been two wires rubbing together near the gas bags, which were encased in a kind of wire framework. There could have been two girders that sort of buckled and caused a spark. So, it came down, it was too heavy, it was being weighed down by the rain falling on its massive envelope, and when it came down, something ignited the hydrogen, which had obviously escaped and mixed with oxygen, and there was a spark, and that’s all it took.”

The end of an era

Whatever caused the R101 disaster, it sent shockwaves across the British Empire, ultimately becoming the death knell for the UK’s airship industry. The victims of the crash lay in state at Westminster Hall, with queues stretching for miles as thousands came to pay their respects.

“It just really hit hard. There were some very well-known and talented officers and engineers and crew aboard that ship,” says Cecilia. “The whole project had been going for years and years, and it was seen as being kind of a crowning achievement of the British Empire. [The R101 crash] absolutely shattered them to the extent that the airship ministry wheeled out the sister ship, the R100, which had made successful flights around the world and was completely intact, and they just took all the gas out of her and actually steamrolled her framework. They steamrolled all the girders into a little mass and then took her off to be melted down for something else, and they said, ‘we’re just not going to do this anymore’.

“So that was the end of the British airship industry, but Germany had always had a lot of success with zeppelins, and Graf Zeppelin had done major flights all around the world. They kept going, and other countries kept going, but then in 1936, when the Hindenburg burst into flames, people just were thinking, ‘OK, that’s it. No more airships, the airships are done, let’s focus on something else’ – and by that time, new technology and new materials had been developed, and people were able to start building bigger, faster, more reliable aeroplanes to carry more passengers and cargo.”

The crash also shattered Will Palstra’s family, with his wife May and young daughter Margaret hit especially hard. From their luxurious estate in England where they had lived during Will’s assignment with the British military, they returned home to Will and May’s house in Surrey Hills, Melbourne, with very little official support.

“There was no counselling, it was like, ‘oh, stiff upper lip, you’ll be fine’. They just got packed off to Australia where instead of living this high life, they lived on a kind of war widow’s pension,” says Cecilia. “My grandmother was inconsolable. She was distraught. And so my mum was basically living in a house with no father, with a mother that cried every day, and two younger siblings, so it affected her very deeply to the extent that she never left that house, she stayed living in the house, she died in the house. She couldn’t leave it because it held all the memories of her father.”

It was this family trauma that eventually led Will’s granddaughter Cecilia to tell his story, she says, as well as a desire for the tragedy of the R101 to not pass from memory.

“As kids growing up, we didn’t know any of that, but there was a vibe, and we picked up the vibe, and we also read [Will’s] letters,” she says. “It was like being haunted a bit because we were living in the house where Mum had grown up, where her father and mother had been so happy together, with trees that he planted, where they’re growing and fruiting. So, you know, he was very much this invisible presence in our lives.

“It’s an important event in world history that at the time was global headlines, and it’s been forgotten, and I don’t want it to be forgotten. I think it’s important to remember things like that because hopefully, we can learn lessons from it, lessons about being more careful, less hasty, and not putting political ambitions ahead of the reality of physics.

“Also, just personally for me, I wanted to highlight this man that I never met, but who had this massive influence on my life.”

Airship of Dreams: The Man Who Rode the Titanic of the Skies, published by Leaves of Gold Press, is out now.