The Legacy Of The Two Surviving Airship Hangars In The UK

There are few steel structures more ambitious yet beautiful in their ostensive simplicity than aircraft hangar buildings, which due to their nature need to be huge, tall and yet completely stable without the use of columns.

Most planes are relatively wide and thus need a lot of space, but the largest aircraft to ever exist needed the largest metal hangars in the world to keep them safe whilst they were under construction.

The largest of these, Aerium, was constructed in Germany in 2000, but the two largest surviving hangars in the UK were made far earlier and have a far more complex legacy as a result, both being tied to Britain’s short-lived and unfortunate Imperial Airship Scheme.

Its origin, why it was cut short and the use of the huge structures at Cardington Airfield in Bedfordshire in the years following paint a fascinating picture of two of the largest hangars ever constructed on British Soil.

The British Hindenburg

From the late 1890s up until the 1930s, the primary way to travel by air was via the use of grand airships, and whilst the vast majority of airship construction was based in Germany, the United States and to a much lesser extent France, the United Kingdom did attempt to catch up.

The Imperial Airship Scheme was the consolidation of several, smaller airship manufacturers and projects designed to compete directly with the German airship programme starting with the development of Her Majesty’s Airship No. 1 “Mayfly” in 1911.

Originally proposed as the “Burnley Plan” in 1922, political machinations led to a two-year delay and the change of the scheme into the Imperial Airship Scheme, named for the stated aim to link the various colonies of the increasingly dwindling British Empire.

The main changes were that there were to be two prototype airships; the first was the R100 to be built by Vickers based on existing airship technology, and the R101 constructed at the two hangars that made up the Royal Airship Works using more innovative and experimental technologies.

They both needed to be able to carry 100 passengers, be able to cruise at 63 mph and have a fuel capacity sufficient for 57 hours of flight, as well as conform to an airframe strength requirement formula, although when the scheme was started this was still being worked out.

The R100 made its first flight on 16th December 1929 and made a rather fraught journey to Canada and back. 

However, the R101 became known as the Titanic of the Air due to its disastrous inaugural flight, one that ultimately was deadlier than the more famous Hindenburg disaster.

Intended to fly to Karachi, then a part of India (now the capital of Pakistan), the R101 took off from Cardington on 4th October 1930. Early the next morning the R101 crashed into a wood outside Allonne, Northern France, immediately catching fire and exploding. It would claim 48 lives.

The exact cause of the accident has been debated ever since, but in 1931 the airship scheme was discontinued, turning the Royal Airship Works into a gigantic storage warehouse, then a barrage balloon construction facility, switching to weather balloons and has since had several uses.

These include the Indoor Model Aircraft World Championships, a Driving Examiner testing site and a gas explosion research facility for the Fire Research Station.

As of 2012, airships have started flying there again in the form of the Airlander 10.