{"id":68456,"date":"2023-11-25T12:46:17","date_gmt":"2023-11-25T12:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/talkcelnews.com\/?p=68456"},"modified":"2023-11-25T12:46:17","modified_gmt":"2023-11-25T12:46:17","slug":"fiery-end-of-the-airship-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talkcelnews.com\/lifestyle\/fiery-end-of-the-airship-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiery end of the airship dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

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So great was the explosion, that a local French rabbit poacher, the only witness to the calamity, was literally blown off his feet, even though he was standing more than 800 feet from the crash site.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the force of the blast left burning debris two miles away.<\/p>\n

There was a tragic irony in the inferno that engulfed the R101, as the huge flying machine was officially called.<\/p>\n

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For the accident occurred in the early morning of Sunday, October 5, 1930, near the start of a long voyage to Karachi, which had been intended by the Air Ministry as a flag-waving, public relations exercise to strengthen the bonds of the British Empire and highlight the advances made by the country\u2019s innovative airship programme.<\/p>\n

But what the disaster really proved were the profound flaws in both Britain\u2019s approach and in the airship technology itself.<\/p>\n

The R101 had come down near the rural commune of Allone, around 60 miles north of Paris. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author S C Gwynne recounts in his magnificent, gripping new history of this doomed airship, the fireball that lit up the night sky soon attracted a large crowd of people, some of them just gawking, others trying to help the survivors.<\/p>\n

The public had to be pushed back by French soldiers and policemen, who formed a cordon to protect the emergency workers as they battled to pull bodies from the wreckage.<\/p>\n

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Once the conflagration had diminished, all that remained was a smouldering blackened skeleton, \u201clooking less like an airship and more like a collapsed wire cage, an impossible tangle of naked girders and struts and wires,\u201d to use Gwynne\u2019s typically vivid description.<\/p>\n

As British officials and journalists began to arrive at the scene, the savage human cost of the crash was revealed in the charred cadavers of those who had been incinerated.<\/p>\n

Many were captured in the postures of their final agonies. Some had arms raised and crossed in front of their faces, as if trying to block the fire. Others had their arms outstretched as though reaching for help.<\/p>\n

One press photographer was so disturbed by the sight he was violently sick and had to return to England. But the episode was the making of Arthur Christiansen, an ambitious 26-year-old from Merseyside who was an assistant editor at the Express newspaper empire owned by the maverick press baron Lord Beaverbrook.<\/p>\n