R100 in Canada and the CNR Connection

R100 in Canada by Barry Countryman
Published by The Boston Mills Press, 1982

There was a long trail of old mental associations that got me thinking again about this book, R100 in Canada. The short version goes something like this: The Dam Busters -> Barnes Wallis -> R100 airship ->R100 in Canada. Ok, the part I didn't make explicit in the chain was that Barnes Wallis was the engineering mastermind who designed the most advanced British airship, the R100, which, as it turns out, was the only rigid airship to fly in Canada during the classic airship period of the early 20th century.

I've known about this book for a long time, but finally broke down and bought a copy last week after coming across a very good deal at an online seller. 

Layout of St. Hubert airport as of August 1930.
The airship mooring tower is in the upper left.
The CNR track is the dark, dashed diagonal line.
The temporary excursion train station is the wavy line above the 'Spur of Railway' label.

The story of the R100's visit to Canada is actually quite exciting and was a huge event, so I'll leave you to read all about it in the book. However, I'll give you a quick summary of the R100's itinerary: it left Cardington airfield in England early in the morning on 29 July 1930; completed mooring at St. Hubert airport near Montreal 78 hours and 49 minutes later on 1 August 1930; in the early evening of 10 August the R100 cast off for a tour of southern Ontario which included flying over or within sight of Ottawa, Smiths Falls, Gananoque, Kingston, Belleville, Peterborough, Oshawa, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, and Toronto; returned to Montreal on 11 August; departed for England on 13 August.

It turns out the Canadian National Railway had a permanent station at St. Hubert airport, and also built separate, temporary stations at the airport and in downtown Montreal to handle the crowds expected to see the R100 when it was berthed in St. Hubert. It was estimated that around 600,000 people visited the airport while the R100 was there (for comparison, the population of Canada in 1930 was 10.2 million), so they certainly correctly predicted the enthusiasm of the public.

From the book I get the impression that the CNR had a big role to play in the visit. One aspect that surprised me was it provided you-are-there radio coverage of the R100's approach and landing:

"The Canadian National Railways Radio Department in Montreal, believing Canadians would not be satisfied with colourless government bulletins from the mooring mast, decided to report as much of the R100 flight as possible, following the airship up the St. Lawrence until she moored in St. Hubert.

For the 15 station coast-to-coast hook-up it hired Andy W. Ryan of the Department of Agriculture in Ottawa and Charles Findlay, a former Royal Navy wireless operator, to man a broadcasting outpost at Laval University in Quebec City; established an observation post on the roof of its downtown Montreal studios in the King's Hall Building at 1231 St. Catherine Street West; and erected a 60-foot-high wooden tower composed of two telephone poles on St. Hubert Airport property between the main entrance and the CNR excursion train station.

From the tower, W. Victor George, a programmer and announcer at CNRM. Montreal, with other duties at CNR Radio headquarters, and Captain John A. Barron would describe the R100's arrival at the mast."

I was also quite surprised to learn that FROG released a 1/500 scale plastic kit of the R100 in 1965, and Barnes Wallis himself (!) consulted on the kit's development. And as a bonus, a model of the mooring mast at St. Hubert is included. Apparently the kit has been re-popped over the years, so if I ever find one for a reasonable price it might show up here.

Balloons and blimps and other floaty things

That's a rotor on the bottom - it better not flap :-)

Back in the 1980s, in the early part of my working life, I did a brief stint as an aeronautical engineer; I played the role of an ersatz blimp engineer on a few projects. I was enamoured with blimp-like flying machines, and sized and drew and pondered many odd configurations outside my day job. Seeing balloons and blimps in the news causing a national security incident so deep into the 21st century seems quite odd to me after all these years. I had come to dismiss blimpy things as impractical after my '80s inoculation. But, who knows what's going on out there. Maybe there are very advanced lighter-than-air flying machines flying all over the place. It's not like I'm in the loop these days. 

So, in the spirit of lighter-than-air weirdness, maybe induced by standing too close to the helium cylinders decades ago, here are a few sketches of airship hallucinations dug up from my files.

The vibration in those crazy long arms would be wild 

The idea of attaching rotors to blimps was a thing back then. It was thought that the combination of one or more rotors, say from a helicopter or V-22 Osprey, attached to an envelope filled with helium, maybe via a frame or stuck right on the envelope, might produce a vehicle capable of great lift. 

Control was an issue. It's fairly easy to make a spherical envelope point any way you want, but, wow, that sphere has a lot of drag when you need to push it in the direction you want to go.

Ok, well, maybe some sort of triangular base truss is the way to attach those rotors. But still, we're talking a massive structure. Quad-rotor drones weren't a thing then, so maybe with the advances brought about by that technology means these kinds of hybrids aren't completely impossible,

Maybe the sphere isn't the way to go for an envelope, even though it does give the most volume for the least surface area. Maybe a Homer Simpson inspired donut is the ticket; however, the one shown over there is far too small to provide the lift needed. It does though give a place for a central lifting rotor. 

I thought it would be great to have a personal sized airship. There were personal pan pizzas and personal computers, so why not. If it just wasn't for those pesky winds, expensive helium, and so on and so on.....

Try as I might I kept making drawings of design variations years later. All impractical, but nevertheless fun to speculate. I'm still of the opinion that it might be possible to build HO scale airships that fly. My initial attempts weren't very successful, but I think a better modeller than me might be able to make them work. It would certainly add some wildness to a layout. 

On this one the rotors would need to be able to tilt.

This one always struck me as looking rather prissy. Again, those rotors need to tilt.

Maybe ducted fans instead of rotors is the way to go? They too probably needed to be able to tilt. I think this one might swing too much like a pendulum when in flight. 

A somewhat cruder, but likely more practically buildable variation that maybe could be made in HO scale, if not O, although it would be rather large in that scale.

I think it might be possible to build one of these underslung rotor jobs with a streamlined envelope, but the rotor's motion no doubt could cause trouble. You wouldn't want a gust to cause it to slice into the envelope. 

Like everyone else I heard reports that the spy balloon was equipped with propellers and flaps that allowed it some degree of maneuverability. And I heard other reports that said, no, no, none of that. Well, I'm curious to hear what the postmortem on the shot down one has to say, if the report ever sees the light of day. 

The machines in all my little sketches have rotors, and some have flaps of various sorts, but these vehicles aren't designed for high altitudes like 65k+ ft. I'm wondering if those balloons use some sort of strato-sailing technology? Maybe one day we'll find out.

That rotor looks way too close

This one and the previous have a keel that runs along the bottom of the hull to attach all the necessary flight equipment.

In this one the keel even has a whale-tail attached. I don't know how effective it would be for control, and the vertical fin looks too small. Hind sight is 20/20.

Well, I'm keeping my eyes to the skies. If some big, honking blimp with an equally big rotor attached crashes in my backyard, you'll hear it here first :-)

Cue the X-Files music.

The R-100 airship in N scale?

We also paid a visit over the holidays to the Aviation and Space Museum out in the east end. I'm not going to give a trip report on all the interesting airplanes you'll see out there, but I will mention one particular curiosity: their model of the R-100 airship that flew to Canada from England and back again in 1930. In HO scale, the model would measure a whooping 8.3' - a little longer than the entire Alta Vista TC layout! - and in N-scale a more manageable 4.5'. The model seems closer to 4.5' than 8.3', so I'm putting my money on its scale being closer to N than HO. When we got home I hunted around for Nevil Shute's old autobiography called Slide Rule. The book has a few fascinating chapters about his time as chief 'calculator' on the R-100's construction team, and some insight into the disastrous crash of the R-100's sister ship, the R-101, where 48 of the 54 people onboard were killed.

From the Hanger

Vince and I took his time machine out for a spin. He just got an alternative universe module installed and was keen to show it off. It worked great! When we got back I found this page stuffed between the seat cushions.

Look! Up in the Sky!

It's not a bird or a plane or Superman, it's the Goodyear blimp! Recently I read that Goodyear put a new blimp into service, Wingfoot Two, and I was reminded of the blimp chasing I did back in the mid-80s.

Although I enjoy model railroading, I've never been much of a serious train chaser, but there was a time when blimp watching was my thing.

This particular landing sequence I shot outside the fence of the old Downsview Airforce Base in Toronto maybe in '85 or '86. 

I think that yellow station wagon off to the left is an AMC Eagle. 

Nose down, on final approach.

I recall there was a big ground crew that travelled with this ship. That's one of their buses in in the foreground.

Vehicles cleared, everything is ready for a perfect landing.

I don't seem to have any photos of the docking operation, just this one last shot over the gate of the moored blimp.

Trains and the formative years of Alberto Santos Dumont

Last weekend Debra and I watched the above PBS Nova episode about the life and work of arguably the greatest aviator of the 20^th century, Alberto Santos Dumont. The show is excellent with lots of photos and film footage I hadn’t seen before. One point that was left out, but was noted in Nancy Winter’s biography of Dumont, Man Flies, was that he honed his formidable engineering skills by helping to run and maintain the railroad that ran on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil. Winter's noted that it had 60 miles of track and included this picture.

HO scale blimps revisited

The post HO-scale Logging Airships continues to be the second most popular at this blog. I started to wonder what it would cost to buy the parts to build one of those little blimps. When I went to the Plantranco site to cost out the parts I was pleasantly surprised to see that they now sell a nano-blimp R/C toy that looked just the right size for an HO scale layout. Naturally I immediately ordered one. It's proving harder for me to learn how to fly one of these things than I expected. That’s not a reflection on the item, just on my inept flying skills.

Basically, the kit consists of a very well engineered propulsion module, a radio control unit with joysticks, and some balloons and miscellanea. All you need to do is charge up the propulsion module, tape it to the bottom of the balloon, add some ballast to make the whole thing neutrally buoyant and you’re ready to fly. It goes together easy and works just fine. The only extra things you need to buy are some AAA batteries and helium. I bought a small tank of helium at Walmart that is marketed for filling children’s party balloons.

{A sketch of a one-person spherical airship I did back around 1985. Its envelope is very optimistically small for something getting its lift from helium.}

When I was at Walmart buying helium I also picked up a pack of white, ‘helium-proof’ balloons since the ones in the kit are coloured and marked with the seller’s brand. I wanted the balloon to look more like the LTA-20-1’s envelope.

I’m a horrible flyer and am still trying to get the hang of the controls. I don’t play video games, so I’m probably climbing some steep learning curve hand-eye coordination wise. Also, I find it a little difficult to get the blimp to be neutrally buoyant. Again, more practice is probably what’s called for.

This thing seems to have lots of potential and once I get the hang of flying it I’ll post again to try and elaborate on using it as a potential OO, HO, or N scale free-flying blimp.

400 posts; 1 about blimps

Time flies. The latest post in the E. L. Moore series was #400 for this blog. 400 posts – well, 400 and 1 counting this one. I can hardly believe it. I know that for many blogs, 400 isn't that many, but it seems something like a milestone for me. Google’s stats say the blog has had 36,767 hits up until now, so that’s an about an average of 92 hits per post. In fact, though, the hits aren’t sprinkled evenly over all the posts; some have had a lot more than others, some a lot less, and some have been special favourites of roving spam-bots :-)

From the high hit count, and Google stats showing searches for variations on the phrase ‘HO scale airships’ that lead visitors to the blog, the post called HO-scale logging airships? has been the 2nd most hit over the years. In it I talked a little about an airship called the LTA-20-1 that was being developed in the mid ‘80s, and speculated on how an HO-scale radio-controlled flying model might be built. The real-McCoy was being designed to do things like aerial logging, lifting de-railed freight cars, and assisting with pipeline construction. For a while I was a wet-behind-the-ears junior engineer on the project with a minor role doing some flight dynamics analysis. Unfortunately, a full-scale flying prototype was never built, but it did leave me with some interesting memorabilia -now stuffed away in dusty boxes down in the basement. Here’s a scan of the project’s promotional brochure.

These days I look at it as I was participating in a rather unusual art project.