Despite his Cheltenham manners and ministerial calm, Christopher Birdwood Thomson is a man obsessed. He has been the driving force behind a scheme to connect the far-flung outposts of the British Empire through the new medium of the air. He has taken firm hold of the national building program whose purpose is to show the world that it can be done. Flying R101 to India will be the proof. R101 is his baby. Or perhaps more accurately, the spawn of his gauzy, rainbow-inflected vision of a future in which fleets of lighter-than-air ships float serenely through blue imperial skies, linking everything British in a new space- time continuum.
“Travelers will journey tranquilly in air liners to the earth’s remotest parts,” Thomson has written, “visit the archipelagos in southern seas, cruise round the coasts of continents, strike inland, surmount lofty mountain ranges, and follow rivers as yet half unexplored from mouth to source. . . . They will obtain a bird’s-eye view of regions made inaccessible hitherto by deserts, jungles, swamps, and frozen wastes . . . high above the mosquitos and miasmas, and mud and dust and noise. By means of the airship man will crown his conquest of the air.”
These were extravagant promises. But in the fall of 1930, when airplanes are still uncomfortable, dangerous, and in constant need of refueling, Lord Thomson’s vision seems entirely plausible. Planes are short-hoppers, the Lindbergh miracle notwithstanding. Oceangoing ships are irremediably slow. Airships, on the other hand, can span empires, specifically the one belonging to the British, which has grown by a million square miles and 13 million souls since the end of the Great War. “I always fancied the dirigible against the aeroplane for the overhead haulage in the years to come,” wrote Rudyard Kipling, reflecting the fashionable thinking of the day. If Lord Thomson can’t bring the imperial dominions, mandates, protectorates, colonies, and territories closer in space, he can bring them closer in time, which is really the same thing. The interval required for global travel—with regular passenger and mail service—can be reduced from oceangoing weeks to airborne days.

According to later statements from one witness on the ground, “The wind was very violent and the rain was rather strong. The wind was coming in gusts, a tempest from the southwest, very strong, but not lasting. The wind was in heavy gusts and changing in direction.” Another witness said, “The wind was blowing in squall.” The air temperature is fifty degrees Fahrenheit.
R101 continues to labor forward, going so slowly—twenty mph over ground—that a witness on the ground thinks that she seems “in difficulty.” She has averaged a mere thirty-three mph over the 248 miles they have traveled since leaving Cardington. She is two and one-half hours behind schedule. Her crew will have to do much better if they are to make Lord Thomson’s state dinner in Ismailia.
Nor does Leech witness the change of watch, which happens on schedule at 2:00 a.m. Captain Irwin retires. Second Officer Maurice Steff takes command of the ship. He is the least experienced of R101’s officers. The chief coxswain is the handsome veteran George “Sky” Hunt, who supervises the rudder and elevator coxswains.
In the lounge, Leech, sitting peacefully, feels a massive shift in the unseen world around him. The movement is violent and sudden. In an instant everything in the lounge is moving, including Leech. He is thrown forward. He slides along the settee and comes up hard against the forward bulkhead along with his table, ashtray, glass, and other glasses and the soda siphon.
Because he is in a sealed chamber with no view on the outside world, he has no horizon lines, no landmarks, to tell him what is happening to the ship. But he can feel the world drop away. The airship is in a dive. He tries several times to get to his feet. He has the strong sense that, as he says later, “we must have dived a considerable distance.”
He finally manages to stand and realizes that the sealed container he is in has leveled out. The crashing sounds have stopped. He drags the table back into position, picks up the glasses and soda siphon, and places them back on the table. For a moment—it will not last long—everything again seems right in the world.