"Lighter than Air", Lee Payne
8 May 2021 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've been very much enjoying an ex-library (probably retired years ago as obsolete; the book was written in 1977) history of airships written by an American photographer/journalist, Lee Payne; given that his only other credit is the prosaic "Getting Started in Photojournalism" this seems to have been a passionate hobby project rather than anything to do with his day job (in 1961 he took a ride on the last Navy blimp... He decided to learn more about airships. This book is the result).
The book is fascinating; it's one of those rare cases where an author researches a complex subject with many interweaving strands and manages to present it as a series of coherent stories. Zeppelins pop in and out of many of the other sections, the history of the British airship industry is covered in two widely separated stages (first as part of the story of the Allied attempt to annex German airships and technology post WW1, then as the more famous -- and infamous -- story of the R100 and R101), and there is a chapter dealing specifically with airships in the Arctic. But the author has managed to organise his narrative in a way that makes the whole thing feel logical and sequential. He presents the complex design issues involved in a way that is easily accessible to the layman, and he writes with great clarity and enthusiasm while quoting very extensively from primary sources of the period.
The final chapter, on the possible future of airship technology as seen through the lens of the 1970s, makes somewhat wry reading today, not because so much has changed but because ironically so little has changed. The issues of pollution and of fuel shortages that loomed so large at that era have returned today in full force (although no-one now, I hope, would suggest that the future of the airship lies in nuclear reactors borne aloft in specially-designed padded containers to save the world from contamination in the case of a crash). The proposed applications for 'modern airships' of today have changed very little from those suggested fifty years ago -- and are about as likely to happen, I suspect.
I had a general background knowledge of airships, but there is tons of stuff in here of which I had no idea: for example, that the R100 was the second airship designed by Barnes Wallis that was a practical success but was ultimately to be scrapped due to negative publicity from the crash of a rival. Roald Amundsen of South Pole fame not only took part in a (successful) North Polar airship flight, but eventually died in an airship accident while trying to rescue a fellow explorer. The first man to construct reliable, airworthy craft for regular use was a Brazilian playboy living in Paris, who built a series of airships including a little 36-foot personal runabout in which he would fly around town, and then went on to build pioneering aeroplanes. Likewise Count Zeppelin's airships were developed thanks only to his personal fortune, in the face of consistent rejection from the German government (and as a consequence of his being on the losing side of the Prussian takeover, which cost him his military and diplomatic career).
Lee Payne manages to synthesise all these accounts into a fascinating and coherent narrative of related developments all across the world and across a long time period. He makes a good argument that many of the airship disasters after the First World War were caused by the failure of the Allies even to recognise that Zeppelins existed in a variety of highly specialised types, and, crucially, that the specific craft they had managed to capture as wartime reparations were extreme high altitude craft unsuitable for basing heavyweight designs upon. It's interesting to learn from an American author about the US airship programme, of which one normally hears nothing and which apparently went on into the 1960s in the form of Navy 'blimps' - but it's also worth noting that Payne makes an admirable job of writing about the history of his subject all across the world without any hint of US-centric bias, to the degree that one forgets his nationality. (There are a few fascinating hints about Soviet Russian airships, which were hidden at the time of writing in deepest Cold War paranoia; one wonders what further information might be available to a researcher now.)
This book is beautifully written with a clear love for the subject, and covers some highly technical material without ever becoming in the least tedious. It was an enthralling and very entertaining read.
The book is fascinating; it's one of those rare cases where an author researches a complex subject with many interweaving strands and manages to present it as a series of coherent stories. Zeppelins pop in and out of many of the other sections, the history of the British airship industry is covered in two widely separated stages (first as part of the story of the Allied attempt to annex German airships and technology post WW1, then as the more famous -- and infamous -- story of the R100 and R101), and there is a chapter dealing specifically with airships in the Arctic. But the author has managed to organise his narrative in a way that makes the whole thing feel logical and sequential. He presents the complex design issues involved in a way that is easily accessible to the layman, and he writes with great clarity and enthusiasm while quoting very extensively from primary sources of the period.
The final chapter, on the possible future of airship technology as seen through the lens of the 1970s, makes somewhat wry reading today, not because so much has changed but because ironically so little has changed. The issues of pollution and of fuel shortages that loomed so large at that era have returned today in full force (although no-one now, I hope, would suggest that the future of the airship lies in nuclear reactors borne aloft in specially-designed padded containers to save the world from contamination in the case of a crash). The proposed applications for 'modern airships' of today have changed very little from those suggested fifty years ago -- and are about as likely to happen, I suspect.
I had a general background knowledge of airships, but there is tons of stuff in here of which I had no idea: for example, that the R100 was the second airship designed by Barnes Wallis that was a practical success but was ultimately to be scrapped due to negative publicity from the crash of a rival. Roald Amundsen of South Pole fame not only took part in a (successful) North Polar airship flight, but eventually died in an airship accident while trying to rescue a fellow explorer. The first man to construct reliable, airworthy craft for regular use was a Brazilian playboy living in Paris, who built a series of airships including a little 36-foot personal runabout in which he would fly around town, and then went on to build pioneering aeroplanes. Likewise Count Zeppelin's airships were developed thanks only to his personal fortune, in the face of consistent rejection from the German government (and as a consequence of his being on the losing side of the Prussian takeover, which cost him his military and diplomatic career).
Lee Payne manages to synthesise all these accounts into a fascinating and coherent narrative of related developments all across the world and across a long time period. He makes a good argument that many of the airship disasters after the First World War were caused by the failure of the Allies even to recognise that Zeppelins existed in a variety of highly specialised types, and, crucially, that the specific craft they had managed to capture as wartime reparations were extreme high altitude craft unsuitable for basing heavyweight designs upon. It's interesting to learn from an American author about the US airship programme, of which one normally hears nothing and which apparently went on into the 1960s in the form of Navy 'blimps' - but it's also worth noting that Payne makes an admirable job of writing about the history of his subject all across the world without any hint of US-centric bias, to the degree that one forgets his nationality. (There are a few fascinating hints about Soviet Russian airships, which were hidden at the time of writing in deepest Cold War paranoia; one wonders what further information might be available to a researcher now.)
This book is beautifully written with a clear love for the subject, and covers some highly technical material without ever becoming in the least tedious. It was an enthralling and very entertaining read.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-10 02:43 pm (UTC)I hope there are copies in all the public record libraries. Knowledge like this can be so easily lost and the research impossible to replicate.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-10 03:05 pm (UTC)But a quick look suggests that there are a lot of copies still out there (WorldCat) and even that an updated edition was brought out in the 1990s; it would be quite interesting to know what, if anything, was changed. More info on Soviet airships? ;-)
Here's an interesting preview of the publication courtesy of Aviation Brussels...