This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.

Here's John Bachelor.

August 23rd, 1921, R38 is a rigid airship.

That is an introduction to a story that involves a much larger airship

nine years later. That ship is His Majesty's airship. And the author S. C. Gwynn tells us this is the

life and tragic death of the world's largest flying machine.

I welcome Sam, a very good evening to you.

Thank you for this.

We go to August 23rd, 1921, because this was a voyage to demonstrate the authority and the success of a rigid airship to the British population flying over the city of Hull

and then over the Humbert River eventually 12 days later. What we're looking at here is a rigid

airship that people have a vague understanding of because of the Hindenburg tragedy. What at the time

was the ambition of those flying that ship?

How did the United Kingdom, how did the British Empire regard rigid airships now

two years after the Versailles Treaty?

Good evening to you, Sam.

Good evening.

Yes, this was a major event in the post-war years in Great Britain.

R-38 was meant to be kind of a world-beater. These rigid airships, and we think of rigid

airships, it's not a blimp, it's not a balloon. It is a steel, think of a steel structure in which there are these huge gas bags that allow to, a blimp doesn't have any steel structure around it. And of course, a balloon doesn't either. So these things were, if you think of the Hindenburg, that was one. So that will frame it for people. But this, in the immediate post-war years,

this was Great Britain's attempt to kind of beat the world

in this technology that had been around for about 20 years,

vented by the Germans.

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