Post Mortem

The British dirigible R-101 crashed in France and killed 48 occupants because of leaking gas and bad weather. That fact, which everyone already knew, was virtually the sum total of the long-awaited report of the court of inquiry, delivered last week in London. The investigators fixed no blame upon Lord Christopher Birdwood Thomson, the Secretary of State for Air (killed in the crash) who was said to have hastened the start of the flight to India to precede the opening of the Imperial Conference. But they gingerly admitted that the inadequately tested ship ''would not have started ... if it had not been that reasons of public policy [made it] highly desirable for her to do so if it could." As for the leaking of the gas bags, through their chafing against metal parts: ''Something of this sort . . . had happened before and no amount of care could secure that it would not happen again."

Distressed was the British press, which had looked to the report for something to bolster the public's wavering faith in Britain's lighter-than-air program. Some thought they heard the knell of the dirigible in Britain's air service, began to talk of dismantling the R-100 which has lain idle in her hangar at Cardington since last year's unspectacular flight to Canada.

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