R100 Airship kit in 1:600 or 1:700 scale

In 1924 the newly elected British Labour government in London launched it's

"Imperial Airship Scheme." This was an ambitious plan to link the then enormous British Empire with an air service using a fleet of purpose built rigid airships, the first two being the R101 and the R100.

The R101 was built at the public airship works at Cardington in Bedfordshire, England and was soon nicknamed the "Socialist Airship" reflecting its position as the government's favourite. 

Meanwhile R100, known as the "Capitalist Airship" was developed at Howden in Yorkshire in a private enterprise with finance from Vickers. Setting up the two construction projects in competition with each other was a deliberate bid to encourage innovation in design and technical development.

R100 was the more straightforward design of the two, but still had many groundbreaking features and ultimately proved to have much superior air handling qualities. On 16 December 1929 four hundred soldiers cautiously walked R100 out of her build shed fully trimmed and ready to make her maiden voyage. All went well and R100 was taken south to be moored at the new Airship Mast at Cardington where further test flights were completed.These demonstrated that there was little that needed to be changed except for one particularly prominent feature: the original sharply pointed tail cone had to be replaced by a cleaner, rounded-off design after it was found to suffer from severe aerodynamic stress. On 29 July 1930, R100 left Cardington enroute for St. Hubert Air Station, Montreal, where a mooring tower with refueling and gassing facilities had been provided by the Canadian Government. 

Although designed to carry 100 passengers in luxury, there were just 13 on board on this inaugural flight plus a crew of 42. The airship reached Montreal on 1 August after surviving a violent thunderstorm as she was flying along the St Lawrence river. Whilst in Canada R100 flew to Ottawa and Toronto and then the Niagara Falls for a flight overlooking New York state. Her captain carefully avoided actually crossing into the United States because of political sensitivities at the time.

R100 was back in England on 16 August, completing the return trip in 57 hours 56 minutes assisted by a tail wind. The outbound journey had taken 78 hours and 49 minutes. With this immensely successful trans-Atlantic voyage completed, R100 was put in her shed at Cardington and thoroughly overhauled in preparation for more intercontinental flights. Then came the R101 tragedy

and fatal crash on her inaugural flight to Karachi in October 1930 and the great promise that R100 offered was never to be fulfilled.......