HMA R101 was intended to be a revolutionary and prestigious display of British engineering. This is the story of the brief life of the R101, and the people involved in the design, construction and flying of it. The airship crashed on 5 October 1930, killing many of those people, and the hopes of the Imperial Airship Scheme. The talk will take a look at some of the curious and sometimes desperate engineering decisions made and is based around the report of the inquiry and a scale model built from the original drawings.