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The R 33
edited from the
Airship Heritage Trust
R33
emerging from the shed at Selby
The ship with the
longest career and the workhorse of the British rigid airships. The
ship had a reputation for being the luckiest ship in the British
rigid fleet
The plans were proceeding for the
second wave of the airship scheme and orders were being placed for
the "30" series ships. The R31 and R32 were of new design and were
being completed by Shorts, whilst the new ships registered R33 and
R34 were on the drawing boards.
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Statistics:
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| Length |
643ft |
| Diameter |
79ft |
| Speed
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62mph |
| Engines |
5 x 250hp |
| Volume |
1, 950, 000cft |
In 1916 the new ship was in the process of
being designed when a stroke of luck, caused the latest German
airship technology to be handed to the British on a plate. On the
night of 23rd/24th September 1916, the German Zeppelin L-33 was
brought down at Great Wigborough, Essex. The L-33's commander had
been participating in an air raid on London when it was damaged by
antiaircraft fire, and then intercepted and brought down by a night
fighter who's fire failed to ignite the hydrogen. However so much
damage was done to the gasbags and fuel tanks that the ship was
forced to descend. The German crew attempted to destroy the ship
instead of it falling in to enemy hands but so little hydrogen was
left that only the doped fabric lit when they fired signal flares in
to the hull. The L-33 was virtually intact and her motors were
undamaged. In one stroke the British had been handed a near perfect
ship full of the latest German technology.
Immediately a crew of investigators recorded every feature of the
ship in detail. This top-secret record took five months to complete.
The designs for the R34 and R34 were put on hold whilst this was
being undertaken. It was with this information that the British
designers could adapt the plans to include what the Germans had done
so successfully, and this enabled the design teams to produce near
copy designs for the R 33 and R 34. The R33 was allocated to
Armstrong and Whitworth at their Barlow works just some 3 miles
south of Selby, Yorkshire.
The manufacture of the components for the R33 and her sister ship
R34 had begun in the summer of 1917, but the actual construction of
the ship in the shed did not commence until the summer of 1918. The
ship had a marked resemblance of the L33 although the similarity in
numbering was purely coincidental; the R33 has been designated in
early 1916 before the crash. The ship design was semi-streamlined
fore and aft, with a parallel mid-ships section. The main control
car was positioned well forward on the ship, and on closer
inspection was separated from the engine in the rear of the car by a
small gap. This was designed to stop vibrations from the engine car
being transmitted down to the forward control car, with its radio
detection finding and wireless instruments. Hence, the forward
control car and engine car looks as if it is one combined piece, but
serviced by two ladders into the hull above.
The inside of the gondola
Two more power cars
were suspended in the wing positions further aft along the hull and a
single engine aft car was positioned amidships at the rear of the
craft. All five engines were 275 hp, Sunbeam Maori water-cooled
petrol units. The power cars were another technical advancement in
airship technology, which included two gearboxes for each engine,
enabling the engines to be started up and running without the
propellers rotating. The ship carried enough fuel for 48 hours engine
running, but to increase range it was possible to fly the ship on
only 3 engines, giving the ship a speed of some 40 knots with petrol
consumption of one mile a gallon. The petrol was held inside the hull
and fuel flowed from them by gravity to header tanks in the engine
gondolas. The reasoning behind this change of arrangement was to feed
a smoother and more precise fuel supply than the older arrangements
in earlier ships of direct gravity feed.
The radiators in the forward engine gondolas had the flow of air
regulated by the use of movable shutters, however the rear gondolas
had the old type of traditional "elevated" radiator. Twenty main
frames and thirteen longitudinals made the main structure of the
ship. There were 19 gasbags within the hull giving a capacity of
1,950,000 cubic feet of hydrogen giving a disposable lift of almost
26 tons. The total construction of the R33 came to £350,000
(£9,536,000 today).
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