In the small hours of 2 July 1919, at East Fortune in Scotland, the order came to walk her out. Ground crews hauled a 643-foot hydrogen airship out of its shed into a cold, misty north-easterly wind. On board were around 30 men, a kitten called Whoopsie, and one person who was not supposed to be there at all.

Four and a half days later, His Majesty's Airship R34 drifted down over Long Island with almost empty tanks. It had become the first aircraft to fly the Atlantic from east to west. A week after that, it flew home again, making the first two-way crossing of the ocean by air.

Weeks After Alcock and Brown

The Atlantic had only just been conquered. In June 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had flown a Vickers Vimy non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland. That was west to east, with the prevailing winds behind them. Nobody had yet flown the other way, against the weather, and nobody had flown the ocean and come back.

The R34 was built by Beardmore at Inchinnan near Glasgow and first flew on 14 March 1919. It held 1,950,000 cubic feet of hydrogen and was driven by five Sunbeam Maori engines in gondolas slung beneath the hull. Its commander, Major George Herbert Scott, was one of Britain's most experienced airship captains.

British Pathé newsreel of the R34 airship in 1919.

A Stowaway Between the Gasbags

Early in the flight the crew found an extra man hidden between the girders and the gas bags. William Ballantyne, a crew member, had been dropped from the crew to save weight and had sneaked aboard anyway, together with the ship's mascot kitten. Scott could hardly turn back. Ballantyne was put to work as a cook and helped pump fuel, and was later sent home by ship.

The westbound crossing was hard. The airship met fog, gales and heavy rain, and a thunderstorm over the Bay of Fundy on 5 July threw it around violently. Headwinds ate into the fuel. A cracked engine water jacket was patched, The Engineer reported, with copper sheeting and chewing gum.

A Parachute Over Long Island

Scott had planned to stop for fuel at Montauk on the tip of Long Island, but a tailwind at the end let him press on to Roosevelt Field at Mineola. There was a problem waiting there: nobody on the ground knew how to handle a large rigid airship. So Major E. M. Pritchard strapped on a parachute and jumped. He became the first person to arrive on American soil by air from Europe, and organised the landing party himself.

The R34 touched down on 6 July after 108 hours and 12 minutes in the air. It had started with about 4,900 gallons of fuel and landed with enough for perhaps 40 more minutes of flying. Crowds poured onto the field.

The Way Home

The airship left Mineola just before midnight on 9 July, after circling over New York. The return was faster with the wind behind it, even after one of the five engines failed with a broken connecting rod. Ordered at the last moment to land at Pulham in Norfolk instead of East Fortune, R34 arrived there on 13 July after about 75 hours, having flown the Atlantic both ways.

The welcome at Pulham was muted compared with New York. R34 went on to train crews until January 1921, when a navigation error in bad weather sent it into a hillside on the North Yorkshire Moors. It limped back to Howden, was further damaged overnight, and was scrapped. Its record stands: the first east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic by air, and the first round trip.

British Pathé: Airship That Made History, R 34 (1919).

Sources: Wikipedia (R34 airship), HistoryNet, The Engineer, Library of Congress, British Pathé