Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "THE DЕАDLIEST civil airship accident: Forgotten British Giant R.101" video.

So called "tracer bullets" were used, interspersed with regular rounds in a machine gun to show where the bullets were going. Those are the streaks of light you see in WWII films. Someone figured out that if you load only tracers you can bring down Zeppelins, since they light the hydrogen on fire. Simple really.
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Some great vids in this. Fun facts from the R101: The smoking room was pressurized to keep any stray hydrogen from entering and possibly igniting from cigarettes. As a result, at least one survivor was from the smoking room, since the fire that engulfed the R101 didn't reach the smoking room. Smoking saved his life. Another interesting fact was the (very few) survivors reported that they could not breathe after exiting the burning R101. The hydrogen had removed the oxygen from around the craft by combining with it, resulting in a local lack of oxygen. The famous quote from the book "slide rule" was a Zeppelin engineer came to see the R101 works and told the Brits: "you have copied all of our engineering... including our mistakes". I rode a Zeppelin around San Francisco several years back (yep, made by Zeppelin Co, yep a true dirigible). Very enjoyable flight. The windows were open all the way and you could stick your hand out and feel the slipstream. Sadly, the airship was disassembled and shipped back to Germany during the 2008 "great recession". The Zeppelin I flew is shown in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAcVDltrZe4 I didn't find any good videos of the interior of the airship. Perhaps sometime I will load my video of it, which does show that.
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