at Cardington) "how bad the other ship was." The end of the British airships The tale of the design of R100 and its claimed superiority to R101 is told in Shute Norway's Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer, first published in 1954. Although flawed and not quite as overwhelmingly superior as Shute Norway implied, R100 represented the best that conventional airship technology in Britain had to offer at the time. R101 suffered in comparison partly because of its many groundbreaking but ultimately dubious innovations, and also because of the weight of its diesel engines. In lifting efficiency, both dirigibles were inferior to the smaller LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin. After R101 crashed and burned in France, en route to India on 5 October 1930, the Air Ministry ordered R100 grounded. The airship was deflated and hung up in its shed at Cardington for a year whilst three options were considered: a complete refit of R100 and continuation of tests for the eventual construction of R102; static testing of R100 and retention of about 300 staff to keep the programme "ticking over"; or retention of staff and the scrapping of the airship. In December 1931, the R100 was broken up and sold for scrap. The framework of the ship was dismantled, flattened by a steamroller and cut up into sections sold for less than £600. Specifications (as first flight) See also References Notes Citations Bibliography Anderson, John. Airship on a Shoestring: The Story of R-100. Bedfordshire, UK: Bright Pen, 2014. . Gilbert, James. The World's Worst Aircraft. Walton-on-Thames, UK: Michael Joseph, Third Edition 1975. . Griehl, Manfred and Joachim Dressel. Zeppelin! The German Airship Story London: Arms & Armour, 1991. . Hartcup, Guy. The Achievement of the Airship: A History of the Development of Rigid, Semi-rigid, and Non-rigid Airships. London: David & Charles, 1974. . Higham, Robin. The British Rigid Airship, 1908-1931 London: Foulis, 1961. Masefield, P. To Ride The Storm. London: William Kimber, 1982. . Morpurgo, J.E. Barnes Wallis: A Biography. London: Longman, 1972. . Mowthorpe, Ces. Battlebags: British Airships of the First World War: An Illustrated History. London: Alan Sutton Publishing, Ltd., 1995. . Pratt, Michel. Airships R-100 and R-101: The Success of the R-100's trip to Canada and the Tragedy of the R-101 in France . Éditions Histoire Québec. Ventry, Lord and Eugene Kolesnik. Airship Development (Jane's Pocket Book 7). Durham, UK: Macdonald Press, 1976. . Ventry, Lord and