British Airships, Past, Present, and Future

by George Whale

Mechanical traction will also help effectually in handling airships on the ground, and the difficulty of taking them in and out of sheds has always been unduly magnified. The provision of track rails and travellers to which the guys of the ship can be attached, as is the practice in Germany, will tend to eliminate the source of trouble.

We must now consider the effect that weather will have on the big airship. In the past it has been a great handicap owing to the short hours of endurance, with the resulting probability of the ship having to land before the wind dropped and being wrecked in consequence. Bad weather will not endanger the big airship in flight, and its endurance will be such that, should it encounter bad weather, it will be able to wait for a lull to land. Meteorological forecasts have now reached a high state of efficiency, and it should be possible for ample warnings to be received of depressions to be met with during a voyage, and these will be avoided by the airship flying round them. In the northern hemisphere, depressions generally travel from west to east and invariably rotate in a counter-clockwise direction with the wind on the south side blowing from the west and on the north side blowing from the east. Going west, the airship would fly to the north of a depression to take advantage of the wind circulating round the edge, and going east the southern course would be taken.

Lastly, the vulnerability of the airship must be taken into account. Hydrogen is, as everyone knows, most highly inflammable when mixed with air. The public still feels uncomfortable misgivings at the close proximity of an immense volume of gas to a number of running engines. It may be said that the danger of disaster due to the gas catching fire is for peace flying to all intents and purposes negligible. At the risk of being thought hackneyed we must point out a fact which has appeared in every discussion of the kind, namely, that British airships flew during the war some 21 million miles, and there is only one case of an airship catching fire in the air. This was during a trial flight in a purely experimental ship, and the cause which was afterwards discovered has been completely eliminated.

For airships employed for military purposes this danger, due to the use of incendiary bullets, rockets and various other munitions evolved for their destruction, still exists.

Owing to its ceiling, rate of climb and speed, which we take to be from 70 to 80 miles per hour in the airship of the future, the airship may be regarded as comparatively safe against attack from the ordinary type of seaplane. The chief danger to be apprehended is attack from small scouting seaplanes, possessing great speed and the power to climb to a great height, or from aeroplanes launched from the decks of ships. If, however, the airship is fitted to carry several small scout aeroplanes of high efficiency in the manner described in the previous chapter, it will probably be able to defend itself sufficiently to enable it to climb to a great height and thus make good its escape.

The airship, moreover, will be more or less immune from such dangers if the non-inflamable gas, known as "C" gas, becomes sufficiently cheap to be used for inflating airships. In the past the expense of this gas has rendered its use absolutely prohibitive, but it is believed that it can be produced in the United States for such a figure as will make it compare favourably with hydrogen.

The navigation of an airship during these long voyages proposed will present no difficulty whatever. The airship, as opposed to the aeroplane, is reasonably steady in the air and the ordinary naval instruments can be used. In addition, "directional" wireless telegraphy will prove of immense assistance. The method at present in use is to call up simultaneously two land stations which, knowing their own distance apart, and reading the direction of the call, plot a triangle on a chart which fixes the position of the airship. This position is then transmitted by wireless to the airship. In the future the airship itself will carry its own directional apparatus, with which it will be able to judge the direction of a call received from a single land station and plot its own position on a chart.

We have so far confined our attention to the utilization of airships for transport of passengers, mails and goods, but there appear to be other fields of activity which can be exploited in times of peace. The photographic work carried out by aeroplanes during the war on the western front and in Syria and Mesopotamia has shown the value of aerial photography for map making and preliminary surveys of virgin country. Photography of broken country and vast tracks of forest can be much more easily undertaken from an airship than an aeroplane, on account of its power to hover for prolonged periods over any given area and its greater powers of endurance. For exploring the unmapped regions of the Amazon or the upper reaches of the Chinese rivers the airship offers unbounded facilities. Another scope suggested by the above is searching for pearl-oyster beds, sunken treasure, and assisting in salvage operations. Owing to the clearness of the water in tropical regions, objects can be located at a great depth when viewed from the air, and it is imagined that an airship will be of great assistance in searching for likely places. Sponges and coral are also obtained by diving, and here the airship's co-operation will be of value. Small ships such as the S.S. Zero would be ideal craft for these and similar operations.

The mine patrol, as maintained by airships during the war, encourages the opinion that a systematic search for icebergs in the northern Atlantic might be carried out by airships during certain months of the year. As is well known, icebergs are a source of great danger to shipping in these waters during the late spring and summer; if the situation becomes bad the main shipping routes are altered and a southerly course is taken which adds considerably to the length of the voyage. The proposal put forward is that during these months as continuous a patrol as possible should be carried out over these waters. The airship employed could be based in Newfoundland and the method of working would be very similar to anti-submarine patrol. Fixes could be obtained from D.F. stations and warnings issued by wireless telegraphy. Ice is chiefly found within five hundred miles of the coast of Newfoundland, so that this work would come within the scope of the N.S. airship. The knowledge that reliable information concerning the presence of ice will always be to hand would prove of inestimable value to the captains of Atlantic liners, and would also relieve the shipping companies and the public of great anxiety.

There are possibly many other uses to which airships can be put such as the policing of wide stretches of desert country as in Arabia and the Soudan. The merits of all of these will doubtless be considered in due course and there for the present we must leave them.