The R-34 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, New York, a distance of 3,300 miles, in 108 hours and 10 minutes, and returned to Pulham, Norfolk, England, in 75 hours and 3 minutes, non-stop flight.
“It is unquestionably her long endurance and great weight-carrying capacity which gives the airship her chief advantage over the aeroplane,” says W. L. Marsh, the eminent authority on dirigibles previously referred to. “It will no doubt be conceded that in spite of the stimulus of war the airship is little further advanced in development than the aeroplane was at the beginning of 1915; and already airships have visited this country”—England—“which could with ease fly from England to America, carrying a considerable load of merchandise. A present-day Zeppelin has a gross lift of sixty-five tons, of which some 58 per cent is available for crew, fuel, ballast, merchandise, and so on. If we take the distance across the Atlantic in a direct line as two thousand miles we get the following disposition of our load of thirty-eight tons:
| TONS | |
| Crew of 30 | 2.3 |
| Ballast | 2.0 |
| Gasoline | 12.0 |
| Oil | 2.0 |
| Extras [food, and so on] | 1.0 |
| —— | |
| Total [say, 20 tons] | 19.3 |
“This leaves eighteen tons available for freight. These figures are based on the ship maintaining a constant speed of fifty miles an hour, at which she would do the journey in forty hours, consuming 650 pounds of gasoline an hour.
“This represents what a rigid airship of slightly over capacity can do to-day, and is given as an indication of what is possible in a comparatively early stage of development.
“No one who has considered rigid airship design and studied rapid strides which aeroplanes have made in the last three and a half years can doubt for a moment that an airship could be built in the course of the next two years which would have a disposal lift—or, in aeroplane parlance, a ‘useful load’—of over two hundred tons, giving it an endurance of anything up to three weeks at a speed of forty to forty-five miles an hour.
“I am endeavoring to state the case as moderately as possible, and am therefore purposely putting the speed at a low figure. I believe I am correct in estimating the full speed of a modern Zeppelin at seventy-five miles an hour. I shall not be too optimistic in claiming eighty miles as a conservative figure for the future. There is little doubt that a ship of some 800,000 cubic feet should be able to carry twenty or thirty passengers, having a full speed of about seventy miles an hour, which it could maintain for two days or more, the endurance at forty-five miles an hour being probably in the neighborhood of five or six days. This ship would be able to cross the Atlantic. A present-day Zeppelin could carry some eighteen tons of freight across to America, and the really big ship—it must be remembered that up to the present we have been talking of lighter-than-air midgets—could transport at least 150 tons the same distance.”
But Mr. Marsh is not the only British authority on aerodynamics who has gone on record as to the practicability of transnavigation of the Atlantic. The British Aerial Transport Committee, consisting of some of the most representative men of Great Britain, such as G. Holt-Thomas, Tom Sopwith, H. G. Wells, Brigadier-General Brancker, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Lord Northcliffe—to mention only a few—in its report of November, 1918, to the Air Council of the British Parliament, says:
“Airships now exist with a range of more than 4,000 miles, and they can travel at a speed of 78 miles an hour. By running their engines slower a maximum range of 8,000 miles can be obtained. On first speed Cape Town, South Africa, is to-day aerially only a little more than three days from Southampton. This ship could fly across the Atlantic and return without stopping. The committee points out that the airship will soon develop a speed of 100 miles an hour, that it will be fitted with ample saloons, staterooms, an elevator to a roof-garden, and it will be able to remain in the air for more than a week.”
Mr. Ed. M. Thierry, Berlin correspondent of the N. E. A., under date of December, 1918, says: “I recently visited the immense works outside Berlin at Staaken. The new super-Zeppelin which is now building has a gas capacity of 100,000 cubic metres. It will have nine engines and eight propellers. This transatlantic Zeppelin is 800 feet in length. It will cost nearly $1,000,000, and it will have a carrying capacity of 100 passengers and forty-five tons of mail and baggage, and thirty tons of petrol, oil, and water and provisions. The first machine for the transatlantic service is to be completed in July, 1919. For maintenance of the service planned, eight active machines and four reserved will be required. As soon as the international situation is clarified it is proposed to establish the service with a hangar in New York.”