I'm going back to with Sam Gwynne.

His exciting new book, Though you understand, this is His Majesty's Airship, the life and tragic death of the world's largest flying machine.

R101 will go down in France. However, there are decisions made here that have defied analysis all

these years since, except Sam has an analysis that makes sense and it's as up to date as

anything that existed in 1930 when they mourned the crash. Moments, the day before the launch on October 4th, our hero, Lord Carrington,

Lord Thompson Carrington, visits Ramsey MacDonald, and Ramsey McDonald asks him not to go.

Don't go now. You don't need to rush this. And he tells Ramsey McDonald's,

our fates are written in the heavens. It's very poetic, Sam. It's very tragic. Did he write

Marta? Do we know? Well, he did. He wrote a note to be delivered before he left to be delivered at Christmas time.

But which was kind of how the book ends because he's three months dead at the moment that it gets delivered. But he didn't write her of that line, our fates are written in heaven. That's only for Ramsey McDonald's. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, he was, I mean, he believed he was stepping on this just fantastic airship that was going to take him to Indian back and that the world was going to be great. And was going to be on top of it and he was going to be viceroy of India and he would still

have his girlfriend and life was going to be good. His brother asked him not to take everybody he knew

on board. Why? His brother was aware of all of the problems with this airship. I mean, this was an airship that an airship has a relatively strong steel frame,

but it has an incredibly weak outer cover, which is really just very, very thin, dope linen.

And R1-1's was rotting.

You could put your finger through a lot of it.

It also has these gas bags, which we've said are just, you know, they're animal intestines, they're tiny, they're very

fragile things. So you have this outer cover of linen and cotton, protect, which is extremely

fragile and untested in weather, protecting these huge gas bags,

which were getting holes in them and losing gas all the time, all through the testing trials.

This is a story of incompetence, industrial incompetence here all the way along.

So his brother just knew that this was being rushed along.

This was a risk.

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