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Updated: May 14, 2025
"I understand that when the big English dirigible R-34 came across the Atlantic last summer she was filled with hydrogen, and that her commander and crew all wore felt-soled shoes, so that they would not by any chance cause a spark when they walked over her metal floors and ladders just beneath her great bag." "That is true," vouched John Ross.
The Atlantic has been crossed by Alcock and Brown in a Vimy-Vickers biplane, and also by our NC-4 flying-boat under the command of Lieutenant Read, and by the big English dirigible R-34; but the Pacific, with its greater breadth, has seemed so impossible that it has never been attempted." "Why should it seem impossible?" "Because they can't carry sufficient gasoline to cross the Pacific."
The R-34 started from East Fortune, Scotland, on Wednesday, July 2, 1919, at 2.48 o'clock in the morning, British summer time, and arrived, after an adventurous voyage, at Mineola, Sunday, July 6, at 9.54 A.M., American summer time. She had clear sailing until she hit the lower part of Nova Scotia on Saturday.
Besides the flight across the Atlantic by the R-34 and the four-day trip of the German airship from Bulgaria to Africa and back, a British airship during the war stayed up for 50 hours and 55 minutes, and another, just after the armistice, stayed up for 61 hours.
When that is done we may very well say that aerial transportation for passengers and freight is an accomplished fact. At the end of 108 hours and 12 minutes of sustained flight, more than four days, the British dirigible R-34 swung into Roosevelt Field, came to anchor, and finished the first flight of the Atlantic by a lighter-than-air airship.
She had come to us, a pioneer over the sea lanes which are to be thronged with the swift dirigibles of the future plying their easy way from America to Europe. The performance of the R-34, undertaken in the line of duty, has eclipsed all the previous records made by dirigibles and is, in fact, a promise of bigger things to come.
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