I'm John Baxter with the author Sam Gwynn. S. C. Gwynn. His book is His Majesty's Airship,

life and tragic death of the world's largest flying machine. We've shown you the disaster of R-38.

There are many other disasters all around the world with these rigid airships flying with hydrogen,

highly flammable hydrogen, more than 1,300 degrees when it burns suddenly and brings these

ships down and destroys the crew. But our Minister of Air, Kit Thompson, has a vision. He's also

Lord Cardington. He's going to build two ships. One is going to be R-100,

and R-100 is going to represent socialism, built by the state. R-101 is going to be built by capitalism,

or at least they regarded as capitalism, and they're going to be built in different places.

R-100 is standard issue material from the German success of rigid airships.

R-101, however, the Imperial Majesty's ship is going to have lots of experiments on it.

Sam, why did they choose to put all these new features on R101?

Should we regard this as a beta? That's our language today. Is that how to view R101?

R101 was going to be an entirely new thing. As we said before, you know, Zeppelin's were invented,

the rigid airships, rather, were invented by Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1900, used extensively

in World War I, which was also a great theater to illustrate their problems, which is that

they all went down in flames, most of them. But our 101, so as you said, there's a capitalist airship and the socialist steership.

The socialist airship was, here, we're going to give you X amount of money, do it for that money.

R-101 was what we'd call cost plus.

It was like, vickers, it was whatever you wanted.

And they just loaded it with technology.

And it was meant to be a flagship of empire. It was

meant to demonstrate, you know, if you look back on the British Empire, it's kind of built on the,

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