‘His Majesty’s Airship’ Review: Empire of the Sky

The British airship R101 was the “Titanic” of the skies, a steel-framed giant nearly 800 feet long. On the evening of Oct. 4, 1930, the R101 set off from Cardington, north of London, en route to an imperial conference in India. Just after two in the morning, it crashed into a wood north of Paris and exploded. The impact detonated the 5.5 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen in the airship’s 15 gasbags. All but eight of its 54 passengers were burned to death, and two of the initial survivors died shortly afterward from their injuries. Britain’s attempt to span the territories of its empire with airships was over.

There are still “blimps” (powered, unframed airships) in our skies, and even the occasional high-altitude weather balloon, but the brief age of the rigid passenger airship is long gone. “His Majesty’s Airship,” by S.C. Gwynne, is a Promethean tale of unlimited ambitions and technical limitations, airy dreams and explosive endings. Mr. Gwynne, a journalist and historian, sets the R101’s human and mechanical drama against a flammable backdrop: the longer and similarly disastrous arc of the airship as an alternative to the airplane.