Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Deadly Airship Race

Episode Date: November 29, 2019

A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world - and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they produce) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin As the night draws in and the fire blazes on the hearth we warm the children by telling them stories. The three little pigs warns them always to use solid construction materials. But my stories are for the education of the grownups. And my stories are all true. I'm Tim Hartford, gather close and listen to my cautionary tale. It was just before lunchtime on the 14th of October 1929, when Christopher Birdwood Thompson stood up from his desk, dommed his stiff, Humberg Hat, adding a little more to his imposing height of six feet five inches, and walked briskly up the stairs to the Roof Terrace.

Lord Thompson worked on Whitehall, the street at the heart of the British government, to his left, downing street, the official residence of the Prime Minister, to his right, the official residence of the Prime Minister, to his right, the houses of Parliament. But he wasn't looking left or right. Like everyone else in London that day, he was looking straight up. Coozing low over Whitehall was the largest aircraft the world had ever seen. It was a long, slim, silver teardrop, an airship. It was enormous. 735 feet long,

the size of a large Manhattan skyscraper lying on its side, hovering right over their heads. It was a glimpse, Lord Thompson liked to say, of the future. Lord Thompson liked to say, of the future. The vast airship had slowed to a leisurely 40 miles an hour to allow the crowd a better view. People gathered on the Thames embankment. The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII flew his bi-plaintant up to take a look. He would have been able to read in clear black letters near the airship's nose its utilitarian name R101. It must have been quite a moment for Lord Thompson.

Lord Thompson was the British Secretary of State for Air and if not for his bold ideas this remarkable ship would never have existed. I do very often have a sort of vision as to what aviation will be in the future. And I can foresee the time when noble lords will travel in gliders with light engines, winging their way westward along the valley of the Thames, northward to Scotland, and southwards to Hampshire, Barkshire and Kent. On their way, they will need to rest. Perhaps they may call in at one of these giant airships, floating serene and safe,

high up and far removed from terrestrial dirt and noise. It was a vision indeed. The R101, accordingly, was designed as a luxurious floating hotel, a hotel that would swiftly carry men like Lord Thompson to the furthest corners of the British Empire. But the R101 had a rival. When he commissioned the R101, Lord Thompson had proposed a competition between two teams of airship designers. A private company, Vickers, would build the R100. Lord Thompson's air ministry would design and build its own ship, the R101. The air ministry, of course, would be the one to adjudicate which of the two airships was best. Lord Thompson had argued his case in a cabinet meeting.

These arrangements will promote a spirit of friendly emulation. Come off it. What you mean is bloody competition. That competition came to represent more than a clash between two teams. Rather absurdly, it came to symbolize a struggle for supremacy between the two contrasting

economic systems. The press quickly caught on to the idea of this contest, dubbing the R100, the capitalist airship, and the R101, the socialist airship. Not Thompson, affectionately called them my children. Although he certainly had a favourite child. He once said, The R100 brought me pleasure. I hope that the R101 will bring me joy.

But the sibling rivalry would be less than friendly. In fact, it would be deadly. We're sometimes told that competition is good, it raises everyone's game, it brings out the best in us. But sometimes, competition leads to tragedy. You're listening to another cautionary tale. Why not the clock back a few years? And put yourselves in the shoes of the team building the R100, the capitalist airship. The R100 crew were resentful. They had a tight budget and were being judged against a competitor with every advantage. Their rivals had more money and better facilities to build the R101

at the Royal Airship Works, just north of London. but they were also the ones judging the contest, player and referee all at once. The capitalist R100 was built in Hauden, Yorkshire. It was the far end of the country from the seat of Paris in London. The old airship shed there was in poor repair. It was bitingly cold in winter and the corrugated iron roof leaked all year round. The airship framework was eaten away by corrosion, the paper thin cotton covers grew mold. The gas bags themselves were glued together from over a million cow intestines, the only material that was strong and light enough to contain the ever-illusive gas, hydrogen.

Beneath the space-age curves of these great silvery vessels, lurked the viscera of some vast mammalian collective. The smell of the cow-gut was everywhere, and the rats loved to nore at the gas bags. And there was another problem. The government air ministry refused to build a mooring mast at Halden. That might sound like a minor matter, but it meant that the only safe place to park both airships was at the air ministry's royal Airship Works down in London. Once the capitalist R100 had been completed, it would fly down to the Grand Tower at the Royal Airship Works,

where its better-funded, better-connected rivals would sit in judgement, and its designers might never see it again. The Howden team began to wander whether, after completing their task, they would ever get to build another airship. The capitalist R100 team did have one advantage. The chief designer was a genius. Barnes Wallace had designed several airships before, and he would in time become famous for designing a bouncing bomb that could skim

like a stone over the surface of a reservoir, destroying German dams in the Second World War. But all that was to come later. As the icicles formed inside the shed at Hauden, he was exhausted. The schedule was brutal, and the capitalist airship team seriously understaffed. Barnes' wife Molly complained, In our poor little hangar, Barnes' works laid writing-outs as the idiotic people who don't know one end of an airship from the other. Meanwhile the rival team, with their generous government funding, had dozens of people to deal with bureaucratic chores. Still, as I said, Barnes Wallace was a genius, and he needed to be. Building an airship is a difficult

task, both the R100 and the R101 were to have a rigid skeleton to support the engines, cockpits and passenger cabin while traveling at 70 miles an hour. The airships needed covers that could withstand the perishing rays of the sun, the laceration of the rain, and the tugging and heaving of the wind. The whole thing would be wrapped around a series of those vast intestinal gas bags, containing several million cubic feet of extremely flammable hydrogen, and yet everything needed to be ethereally thin and light. These challenges existed for any airship, but the R100 and R101 were attempting to solve them at a larger scale than any previous craft.

The competition required that the socialist R101 was to fly from London to British India in four days, a journey that would take 15 days by ship and even longer in a plane that would incessantly be making risky landings to refuel. The capitalist R100 was to fly from London to Canada and back. In the 1920s, these long haul missions were the equivalent of putting a man on the moon. Barnes Wallace was probably the best man in the country to lead such a moonshot. So, naturally, the team from the well-funded government airship sent their designs up to Wallace to get his views. You know, the spirit of friendly emulation.

And all that. But as sleep deprived, overworked Wallace, sat reviewing the plans of his rivals, he didn't really feel like helping, he didn't respect his opposite number, he's a mere works manager, not a technologist in any sense of the word. And he knew that the game was rigged, why should Barnes Wallace offer any insight into the problems of his rivals? It is the crudest piece of design which I have ever seen. He sent the blueprint for the R101, the socialist airship, back to the Royal Airship Works, with a frosty note offering no suggestions. Until it has been shown on satisfactory, I prefer the arrangement we have worked out for R100.

Then, among the rats, he returned to his thankless task in the cold shed at Hauden. There's nothing inherently wrong with competition. It stops us being lazy, and it allows us to experiment with different approaches. Competitors can learn from each other and copy what works, us being lazy, and it allows us to experiment with different approaches. Competitors can learn from each other and copy what works, so competition is a good thing, but you can have too much of a good thing. Faced with extreme competition, we may do all sorts of things we wouldn't have done in a gentler contest.

We rush things. We crack under the stress. We cheat. Some economists have long been aware of this problem. In 1998, two of them, Robert Drago and Gerald Garvey, studied a large variety of workplaces, distinguishing those places that used high stakes promotion schemes, and those that didn't. Managers in the high stakes workplaces ran their organisations like a tournament. Junior staff who produced the best performance would be rewarded with a promotion, more

money, more status, better conditions. Everyone else would miss out. Classic, high stakes competition. These competitions did make people work hard, but the problem was that workers also stopped helping each other. They wouldn't give advice, or lend each other tools. Why should they? The promotion tournament had turned the workplace into a cutthroat competition. If you helped a colleague, you were helping a rival, you were sabotaging your own chances of success. Drago and Garvey's work perfectly described the psychology of the UK's great airship competition.

It was clear to the capitalist R100 team that if they lost the competition, they were all out of a job. What's more, the competition seemed pretty skewed to them. Their opponents had all the money, all the equipment, and the political connections too. No wonder their lead designer Barnes Wallace didn't feel like offering any pointers. And there's a second way in which too much competition can be counterproductive. A few years ago, four behavioral economists, Dan Arieli, Urignese, George Loenstein and Nina Mazar, tested the effect of super-sharp incentives in a study called large stakes

and big mistakes. They offered people huge rewards of up to six months income if they did well on various tests, like replicating sequences on the children's electronic game Simon, or throwing dark at a target. Bigger prizes should encourage more effort, but we all know that there's a point where the prizes too big, and the pressure is too great. When the incentives were quite small, people did fine. When the stakes were high, people fell apart while trying to do the very same tasks. So, let's sit alongside the fat cats at the Royal Airship Works. Overstaffed, overfunded, and working on the socialist airship, the R101, with the close attention and personal support of the air minister himself, Lord Thompson.

The government team used to joke about the shoestring budget of their rivals, but the joke hid the pressure. They were suffering from the problem of large stakes and big mistakes. Carrying Lord Thompson's hopes and dreams gave them some advantages, but he was to prove an enormous burden in more ways than one. You have to understand how important all this was to Thompson. Remember his vision? He saw airships as flying oasis, serene and safe, taking the British political class to the distant outposts of their empire.

In accordance with Thompson's grand visions, the R101 offered two decks of passenger accommodation, a spacious lounge, prognards by large windows to enjoy the view, and a dining room that would seat 60 people while they enjoyed lavish banquets prepared in the on board kitchen, with serving supervised by the airship steward. Remember, all of this was cradled just underneath 5 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen. There was even, incredibly, a smoking room. All this luxury was a bit ironic for an airship that was supposed to demonstrate the virtues of socialist engineering. But more worryingly, in an experimental ship, these flourishes suggested some serious mission creep. The socialist R101 was over-engineered, over-designed, over-specified, and overweight,

leaving no leeway for spare fuel, cargo, or passengers. The first officer of the R101 could see problems ahead. His name was Noel Athiston, and had been at the helm that glorious day when it flew out over London. He was a tough, analytical man, who hoped to kept in his own airship one day. But having survived two airship crashes in the First World War, he was clear-eyed about the risks. Every crewman is to carry a knife at his belt. Trust me, if you want to survive an airship crash, you cut your way out, and you do it fast. No, Alathaston, new trouble when he saw it.

There's no use in talking or flying to India, but only one stop for refueling. Put that much diesel in the tanks, and it will never get off the ground. Athiston's diaries reveal his concerns. It's a grossly unfair schedule, with impossible tasks, or carried out in a mad Russian panic. But still, Lord Thompson increased the pressure. He gave a speech in which he invited a hundred members of parliament for a ride on the R101. It's a cheap, vulgar stunt and an absolutely unjustifiable risk. Wasn't the R101 supposed to be an experimental aircraft? It was a huge distraction from the rigorous

program of test flights, Athiston wanted to conduct. The ship has not finished a trials, has not got a certificate of airworthiness, and has not got enough lift to cart 12 tons of humans about with any degree of safety. And there was something else that appalled first officer Athiston. In order to create enough lifting capacity for a hundred politicians and their dinner, the R101 crew had been ordered to remove all the parachutes. Remember the research that showed that large stakes led to big mistakes? Lord Thompson was raising the stakes at every opportunity. Mistakes would follow. In the end, the R101 crew decided that the weather was too bad to allow the grounds

demonstration, and the 100 VIPs had dinner on board a stationary R101. That display of caution displeased Lord Thompson. I was hoping for a free breeze so that it could show off its capabilities. The R101 is an all-weather craft. It really wasn't, but who wanted to tell that to Lord Thompson? The R101 team grew desperate about the lack of lift. In preparation for the all-important flights to India, they expanded the hydrogen gas bags, which gave more lift, but also meant that those fragile cow-entestined gas bags were chafing against the bolts of the airship frame. The team even decided to soar the entire airship apart, insert a new

central section with extra gas bags, and stitch it all together again. This frankenship was 777 feet long, faster and with more lift, but could it safely fly? October 1930 was the month set for Lord Thompson's favourite child, the R101, to fly to India and back, a spectacular voyage with Lord Thompson himself on board. The month before that trip, in the summer of 1930, should have been the moment of truth, the moment when the madness stopped. First, the R101 was flown to a nearby airship to be shown off to the crowds. It was widely reported to have dipped its nose to salute the King and Queen. The crew knew that the salute was actually an uncontrolled nose dive above a crowd

of 150,000 people. The huge airship then limped the few miles back to the Royal airship works. The R101's captain went to examine the gas bags in an effort to understand what was going wrong. He made his way slowly along the central walkway, then climbed up between the bags. The front bag, and the second, and the third seemed fine, though the smell of mold was all pervasive. Climbing up the netting that contained the fourth bag, he shone his flashlight around, and noticed something. Small holes. The same was true on bag 5, and 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and

14. In an effort to give the ship more lift, the R101 team had overfilled the fragile bags, which meant that they were rubbing against the airframe, hydrogen was bleeding out everywhere. If the airship could hardly make a two hour round trip, how on earth was it going to fly as Lord Thompson demanded several thousand miles to India? Surely it was the time to admit that the airship wasn't safe. No. The airship team patched up the problem and hoped for the best. A few weeks later, a Mr. Frederick McWade, official airship inspector, came to examine the R101. Mr. McWade climbed up between the molding gas bags, puffing and blowing with the effort.

He was nearly of pensionable age after all, but then he don't spend 27 years inspecting airships without learning to recognise warning signs. He peered closely at the repaired gas bags. Could the patch-up job really be trusted to hold? How many hours of flight before it failed? Mr McWade had no doubts. His report was a thunder clap. I cannot recommend to you the extension of the present pyramid to fly, or the issue of any further pyramids or certificates. R101 was grounded, but this was a thunder clap that nobody was prepared to hear.

So they covered their ears. The R101 had been built by the government and the government issued permits to fly. Nobody wanted to disappoint Lord Thompson and so Mr McWade was overruled. There was another opportunity to call a halt in the late summer of 1930, when Barnes-Wallis his deputy on the R-100 visited the Royal Airship Works to see the R-101. His name was Neville Norway.

He was later to become famous as the novelist, Neville Shoot. Neville Shoot Norway was mightily impressed by the appearance of his bitter rival, the R101. She is an amazing piece of work. The finish and the workmanship is extraordinarily good, far better than that of our own ship, but you don't sound totally convinced. Well, the design seems almost unbelievably complicated. The imagination has run riot regardless of the virtue of simplicity and utterly regardless of expense. Something strange happened to shoot Norway while he was visiting his rivals at the Royal Airship Works.

Two officers looked round to check that nobody was watching, then pulled him into a private office. They brought out a large sheet of silver fabric. Clearly, a section of airship cover. Shoot Norway rubbed it between his fingers and watched in horror as it crumbled into flakes like a piece of charred parchment paper. Good God! Where did this come from?

It had come from the nose of R101, where another attempt at patch and make-dew had backfired as glue had weakened the lacquer on the cover. I hope they've got all this stuff off the ship. They say they have. Neville shoot Norway shrugged. There was nothing he or I could have done about it.

Perhaps that was true, but Neville shoot Norway shrugged. There was nothing he or I could have done about it. Perhaps that was true. But Neville Shoot Norway didn't try. Before the capitalist R100's flight to Canada, the government R101 team had suggested that perhaps these long, dangerous flights might be postponed to allow for further testing. If they'd been able to be more honest, if they'd been under less competitive pressure, they might have begged, dear God, please don't make us fly to India, our airship is a death trap. But they didn't. They couldn't.

They just politely suggested a postponement and shoot Norway and the R100 team. They said no. Again, the bitter competition between the staff's loon large. Perhaps if we had realised at the time how very, very bad that ship was, how real the danger of complete disaster if they started for India, we might have taken a different attitude to this approach. I wonder if the underfunded R100 team were to keep their jobs.

Hours must be the organisation to carry on the work, and they must give up. But could they give up? Lord Thompson had been pressuring the Royal airship works to stick to the schedule for the R101. With the Government of India preparing to receive him, a low-key experiment had turned into a grand diplomatic mission. The Imperial Conference had convened in London. This 45-day summit, including the leaders of nations as far apart as Canada, India and New Zealand, was held every four years. Travel took so long that it was impractical to meet more often.

So, Lord Thompson had a spectacular stunt in mind. Having greeted the visitors at the conference, he would fly to India and back again, in plenty of time for the end of the proceedings, fully rested after floating on a bubble of air. His triumphant speech would present his plans for a fleet of airships to link together the world. Large stakes indeed. I must insist on the programme for the Indian flight being adhered to, as I have made my plans accordingly. Some of the R101 team begged their bosses to speak to Lord Thompson about delaying the flight, but they refused. His lordship had made his plans accordingly.

Late in the afternoon of October 4, 1930, the crew of R101 waited impatiently for the arrival of their most prestigious passenger on their voyage to India, Lord Thompson himself. There was a dreadful storm brewing, ideally, that have left two hours earlier, or half a day later to avoid it, but that was unthinkable. Lord Thompson's assistant ought to be publicly shot for putting such impossible tasks to us. That was Noel Atherston complaining to his diary. He left the diary behind on his desk. His final entry. Let's hope for good luck and do our best. He would never write another.

Though whether it didn't worry, Lord Thompson, the ship he insisted was storm proof. The ride to storm has always been my ambition. And who knows? didn't worry Lord Thompson, the ship he insisted was Stormproof. The ride to Storm has always been my ambition and who knows, we may realise it on the way to India. While they waited for Lord Thompson, the ground crew topped up the gas bags. Or should you pump a get into a bloody colondum? Everyone in the crew knew the bags were in poor shape. George William Humpt was one of the senior officers on the R101.

His son, Albert, remembers carrying his father's kit bag as they walked down the road to the airship shed at Cardington. It was a few hours before takeoff. In the shadow of the ship, his father stopped, then he turned to his son. Now, look, lad, I want you to make me two promises. One is you'll join the Navy, and the other one is you'll promise me that you'll look after your mother and your sister, because I may not be coming back off this flying. The R101's captain understood how marginal his ship's lifting capacity was. He tried to save every ounce.

When crew members tried to take cookie jars aboard, they were told to transfer the cookies into paper bags. Each had a spare shirt and underwear, again in a paper parcel. Suitcases would have been far too heavy. would have been far too heavy. It was 515 in the afternoon when Lord Thompson's chauffeur drove his Lordship's Daimler up to the Mauring Tower. And the noble Lord, still wearing his Humberg hat, unfolded his elongated frame and stood at the foot of the mast to admire his airship. His luggage was loaded into the tower's elevator,

including the briefcase, with his notes for the triumphant speech he would deliver on his return. Here we are. His Lordship's dress short, two trunks, four suitcases and 24 bottles of champagne. And we'll need four porters to ship this carpet. Hurry along. Ah yesals to ship this carpet. Are you along? Oh yes, the ornamental carpet.

It weighed as much as a full grown man. My precious carpet! We'll have it down for the dinners at Ismailia and Karachi to do the thing in style. At 630, with Lord Thompson and his carpet on board, the R101 finally slipped the tower. Immediately the nose dipped, and the captain released tons of ballast water to get her level again. Heavily loaded with fuel, and carpets and champagne, the ship was pitching and rolling even more than usual. It turned towards France in the teeth of the storm.

The crew were exhausted, having been working around the clock to squeeze in short test flights and patch up problems with the engines, the gas bags and the cover. Inside the passenger decks, the esteemed guests, including Lord Thompson and the airship's designers, were being served salad, cold meats and fish. Three hours into the flight, the R101 crossed the English coast and chugged out over the sea towards France. The passengers chatted, smoked and listened to music before making their way to their beds. They didn't realise quite how low over the waves the airship had dropped. It was

sagging under the weight of the rain soaking into the cover. The shattered crew kept trying to lift up her nose, get it to show a bit of pride in the face of the storm. All the while, the ship was barely making progress. But two o'clock in the morning, there was a change of watch. The airship was supposed to be flying at 2,000 feet over the town of Bove north of Paris, but the crew could see Bove Cathedral up close as they passed. The ship was diving. In the smoking room, some glasses and a soda water siphon slid off the table.

Down on the ground, despite the late hour and the rain, a Monsieur Alfred Roubaix was out hoping to bag some rabbits for Sunday lunch. As the Titanic ship loomed down out of the low clouds, he gazed in horror. Far bigger than the Cathedral of Beauvet, the R101 was moving slowly forward, her nose down as though she had given up and just wanted to be allowed to rest. Her thin, wet, fragile front cover had almost certainly ripped under the incessant winds, exposing the perforated hydrogen gas bags to the direct force of the storm. The airship briefly pulled out of its dive, a final show of defiance. Then she dipped again.

At 208, R101 gently nosedived into a forest near Bove. The dark branches tearing into her skin. She was travelling at no more than 15 miles an hour. The passengers would have felt an impact like falling off a bicycle. But no bicycle carries 5 million cubic feet of hydrogen. A single spark and the darkness of the forest was banished by an instant hellish blaze. Alfred Roubaix was the only witness.

I heard the people in the wreckage crying for help. I was 100 yards away. And the heat was awful. So I ran as hard as I could away from that place. Just eight men managed to get out. Among the 48 victims of the crash were first officer Noel Athiston, who repeatedly called for the flight to be postponed, the entire design team of the R-101 and the boss of the mall, Christopher Birdwood Thompson.

The competition was over. R101, the serene hope of the future, had lost. As Neville shoot Norway later wrote, If the cabinet committee wanted competition, they'd got it with our vengeance. And I wouldn't say that it was healthy. There was an inquiry, but nobody from the rival R100 team was asked to give evidence. He even in tragedy, the bitterness of the contest remained. But of course, of course.

After the R101 crashed, the R100 never flew again. It was sawn up, bulldozed, and sold for scrap. There are some competitions then, that everybody loses. You've been listening to cautionary tales, if you'd like to find out more about the ideas in this episode, including links to our sources, the show notes are on my website, timhalford.com. Corsion Retails is written and presented by me, Tim Halford. Our producers are Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound designer and mixer was Pascal Wise who also composed the amazing music.

Starring in this season are Alan Cumming, Archie Panjabi, Toby Stevens and Russell Toby, alongside Enzo Chilente, Ed Gochem, Melanie Guthridge, Maseem and Ro and Rufus Wright, and introducing Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks to the team at Pushkin Industries, Julia Barton, Heather Fame, Mia Label, Carly Milliori, Jacob Weisberg, and of course, the mighty Malcolm Gladwell, and thanks to my colleagues at the Financial Times. and thanks to my colleagues at the Financial Times. Thank you. you