Author : Patrick Abbott
Publisher :
Page : 120 pages
File Size : 26,20 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN :
A pictorial history of British airships. It looks at the bizarre flights of fancy of the 19th century, the heyday of the airship, its successful use during World War I and the disasters of the later period, and finishes with a look at more recent developments and a possible renaissance.
Author : Ces Mowthorpe
Publisher : Alan Sutton Publishing
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 28,60 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Airships
ISBN : 9780750915182
Affectionately named battlebags by their crews and pigs by the local civilian inhabitants, Royal Navy Air Service airships were a familiar sight around Britains's shores. At least 226 airships of all types were built and operated by the Royal Navy during the war in a bid to beat the deadly German U-boat menace.
Author : Malcolm Fife
Publisher : Fonthill Media
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 44,95 MB
Release : 2017-05-17
Category : History
ISBN :
Numerous books have been written on airships, but few concentrate on their bases and infrastructure to support their operations. British Airship Bases of the Twentieth Century starts with documenting the primitive facilities from which the early machines flew in the years prior to the First World War. The outbreak of the First World War resulted in airships being adopted for military purposes and bases were established across Britain. Most of these were operated by the Royal Naval Air Service for the protection of shipping against U-boats. In the 1920s, an attempt was made by the British Government to build airships for commercial transport. The locations where these giants of the sky were constructed are described as well as the proposed overseas passenger terminals. The latter part of this enthralling and detailed book chronicles the attempt to establish the airship as a means of transport to link together the far flung lands of the British Empire. Reference is also made at attempts to revive the airship in the closing decade of the 20th century and the locations associated with them. Illustrations: 170 black and white photographs
Author : Bill Hammack
Publisher :
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 32,82 MB
Release : 2017-12-16
Category : Aircraft accidents
ISBN : 9781945441035
Fatal Flight brings vividly to life the year of operation of R.101, the last great British airship--a luxury liner three and a half times the length of a 747 jet, with a spacious lounge, a dining room that seated fifty, glass-walled promenade decks, and a smoking room. The British expected R.101 to spearhead a fleet of imperial airships that would dominate the skies as British naval ships, a century earlier, had ruled the seas. The dream ended when, on its demonstration flight to India, R.101 crashed in France, tragically killing nearly all aboard. Combining meticulous research with superb storytelling, Fatal Flight guides us from the moment the great airship emerged from its giant shed--nearly the largest building in the British Empire--to soar on its first flight, to its last fateful voyage. The full story behind R.101 shows that, although it was a failure, it was nevertheless a supremely imaginative human creation. The technical achievement of creating R.101 reveals the beauty, majesty, and, of course, the sorrow of the human experience. The narrative follows First Officer Noel Atherstone and his crew from the ship's first test flight in 1929 to its fiery crash on October 5, 1930. It reveals in graphic detail the heroic actions of Atherstone as he battled tremendous obstacles. He fought political pressures to hurry the ship into the air, fended off Britain's most feted airship pilot, who used his influence to take command of the ship and nearly crashed it, and, a scant two months before departing for India, guided the rebuilding of the ship to correct its faulty design. After this tragic accident, Britain abandoned airships, but R.101 flew again, its scrap melted down and sold to the Zeppelin Company, who used it to create LZ 129, an airship even more mighty than R.101--and better known as the Hindenburg. Set against the backdrop of the British Empire at the height of its power in the early twentieth century, Fatal Flight portrays an extraordinary age in technology, fueled by humankind's obsession with flight
Author : Nick Walmsley
Publisher : Sutton Publishing
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 16,58 MB
Release : 2000
Category : History
ISBN :
His Majesty's Airship R101 was intended to be an aerial flagship, connecting the far-flung outposts of the Empire in a fraction of the time it took to make a sea voyage. Her story is one of grand dreams and fine ideas, brilliant technology, political and romantic intrigue, human weakness, heroism and ultimate tragedy. The ill-starred career of the gigantic airship and her horrific fiery end on a French hillside exert the same kind of fascination reserved for the Titanic and the Hindenburg. Her loss in 1930 sent the nation into shock, marking the end of Britain's interest in airships and even perhaps representing the death throes of the imperial dream. This pictorial history of the airship is based on the archives of the Airship Heritage Trust. These include the records of the Royal Airship Works, which built the R101 and have previously denied all access.
Author : Hugh Allen
Publisher : Lulu.com
Page : 98 pages
File Size : 25,1 MB
Release : 2008-09
Category :
ISBN : 1935327062
Originally published by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. as a promotional, The Story of the Airship chronicles the history and development of these great ¿silver cruisers of the sky.¿ Filled with photos and authoritative text, the book springs from an era when dirigibles, balloons and blimps competed against airplanes for public attention.
Author : David Hobbs
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 28,97 MB
Release : 2017-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1848323506
In a few short years after 1914 the Royal Navy practically invented naval air warfare, not only producing the first effective aircraft carriers, but also pioneering most of the techniques and tactics that made naval air power a reality. By 1918 the RN was so far ahead of other navies that a US Navy observer sent to study the British use of aircraft at sea concluded that any discussion of the subject must first consider their methods. Indeed, by the time the war ended the RN was training for a carrier-borne attack by torpedo-bombers on the German fleet in its bases over two decades before the first successful employment of this tactic, against the Italians at Taranto.Following two previously well-received histories of British naval aviation, David Hobbs here turns his attention to the operational and technical achievements of the Royal Naval Air Service, both at sea and ashore, from 1914 to 1918. Detailed explanations of operations, the technology that underpinned them and the people who carried them out bring into sharp focus a revolutionary period of development that changed naval warfare forever. Controversially, the RNAS was subsumed into the newly created Royal Air Force in 1918, so as the centenary of its extinction approaches, this book is a timely reminder of its true significance.
Author : Brett Holman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 17,4 MB
Release : 2016-02-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1317022637
In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth. But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.
Author :
Publisher :
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 20,33 MB
Release : 1952
Category : Aeronautics
ISBN :
Author : John McPhee
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 21,72 MB
Release : 1973
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0374137811
This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the airplane and rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. Its early and secrect experimenta; development took twelve years' time and one and a half million dollars. McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft's successive progenitors and makes it seem as momentous as the first trip to the moon.
