I know you got soul: machines with that certain something Read online

  Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin was neither an aeronaut nor an engineer. But while he was in America, during the Civil War, this German aristocrat and officer was taken up in a tethered observation balloon. And loved it. Back at home he scribbled all kinds of notes about how such a thing might be the key to flight. Steam power had been tried but it was too heavy for the gas to lift. Electric power was even worse because the batteries weighed half a ton each. It would be 25 years before a realistic form of propulsion would come along. The internal combustion engine.

  Using vast chunks of his own money, the Count started work on LZ1. It was huge: 420 feet long and 38 feet in diameter, but despite the bulk it could only lift 27,000 lbs. And when you deducted the aluminium frame and the two marine engines from that you were left with a payload of just 660 lbs. Just one American, in other words.

  Nevertheless, in July 1900 it did actually fly. Not well enough to impress the onlookers though. The power output from the engines was less than you’d get from a VW Beetle and it bent like a banana once it was off the ground. The press said it had no value. The army people said they could see no use for it at all. And so, with all his money gone, the Count broke the ship up and sold the parts as scrap. He said afterwards his heart was broken.

  However, a local king – they had such things in those days – decided to organise a state lottery to get Zeppelin going again, and so, five years later, shortly after Orville and Wilbur Wright had shown the world what a real aeroplane might look like, LZ2 took off. It crashed.

  Teetering on the edge of financial collapse, Zeppelin built the LZ3, but it was too small so along came LZ4, which broke down in midair, crash-landed and then exploded. LZ5 hit a pear tree when the pilot fell asleep at the wheel. LZ6 was burned to a cinder while in its hangar and then, just after an aeroplane crossed the English Channel for the first time, along came LZ7.

  LZ7 was the world’s first proper passenger aircraft with luxury seating and wooden panelling in the gondola. Laden down with 23 journalists and enough caviar to feed them, it flew into a thunderstorm, reared up to 3,500 feet and then plummeted into a forest.

  LZ8 never even got that far. It was wheeled out of the hangar and simply blew away. But astonishingly, and largely thanks to an enthusiastic public, the money kept dribbling in and the Count kept going.

  Due, again, to public opinion, even the sceptical German Navy invested in a couple. The first crashed into the sea, killing the 15 souls on board, and the second blew up on a test flight, killing 28. Then came the war, in which further Zeppelins went about their business of bombing fields and generally cheering up the British.

  The last of the wartime bombers was enormous. Seven hundred feet long with a capacity of nearly 2.2 million cubic feet of hydrogen, it could carry 3.5 tons of bombs and fly higher and faster than any airship before. It really was a technological marvel. But there was a drawback. Because it was so large it was even easier to hit, and it was, diving in a fireball into the sea.

  After the war, with the factory in ruins, Count Zeppelin dead from old age and aeroplane technology coming on in leaps and bounds, they kept on making them, a small but enthusiastic team believing that maybe, just maybe, they did have a role in long-haul flight. It was even suggested the Empire State Building could be used as a mooring tower. But after the Hindenburg mysteriously exploded when coming in to land in America passengers were understandably wary.

  Hitler described them perfectly. ‘The whole thing always seems to me like an inventor who claims to have discovered a cheap new kind of floor covering which looks marvellous, shines forever, and never wears out. But he adds that there is one disadvantage. It must not be walked on with nailed shoes and nothing hard must ever be dropped on it because, unfortunately, it’s made of high explosive.’

  It was Hitler, however, who discovered the only real use for an airship. As Goodyear and Fuji now know, everyone looks up when one of these slow-moving airborne leviathans flies over. That makes them the perfect advertising hoarding. And so it was that in the run up to the Second World War the Zeppelins were adorned with swastikas and sent around the world to drum up support for the Fatherland.

  But in the middle of all this heroic failure there was one airship that did manage to achieve something truly remarkable. A voyage every bit as magical and as hazardous as Scott’s or Cook’s. A journey, for paying passengers, right round the world.

  The year was 1929, the cost of a ticket, in today’s money, would have been £50,000, and the ship in question was LZ127, the Graf Zeppelin.

  This was the mother of all airships, 787 feet long and 115 feet high. Imagine Canary Wharf, on its side, floating over your head… And yet, from inside the gondola the 60 people on board would have had no sense of this gigantism. The salon was small and narrow; the cabins were smaller still, and had to be shared. But this was the twenties, so it was far from spartan.

  Everyone dressed for dinner, and can you imagine that? Dining on fine wines and exotic cheeses while floating in almost complete silence over vast parts of the world that had never been seen from the air before. Russia, for instance. And then, after dinner, as the moonlit tundra drifted by outside the picture windows, dancing the Charleston to the sound of a gramophone that, despite the weight limitations, had been smuggled on board.

  People had been on magnificent journeys before this. But while the destination or the route had always been new and exciting the craft that took them there, be it a ship or a sledge, was always tried and tested. The round-the-world adventure in the Graf was the other way around. The passengers were not going anywhere exciting; they would after all end up where they’d started. It was the craft they were using that made the difference. It was the craft that mattered.

  Every day the journalists on board would send their copy home by carrier pigeon. And it really was purple prose. One, Lady Grace Hay-Drummond-Hay, the only girl on board, came up with this little nugget: ‘The Graf Zeppelin is more than just machinery, canvas and aluminium. It has a soul.’

  After the journey was completed, in just twelve days, the captain in particular, Hugo Eckener, was feted as a hero. But for me, the real star of the show was the machine itself.

  I’ve flown round the world three times in Boeings and Airbuses, and on each occasion I discovered the meaning of true misery. Those long, endless, droning hours over mile after mile after mile of ocean, with nothing to do except watch the blood clots in your legs shake themselves loose, are enough to drive a man insane. But if I were asked tomorrow to go round again on an airship, I’d be there like a cartoon cat.

  There’s something baleful about an airship, something rather sad and gloomy. Like Eeyore in the ‘Pooh’ stories, who can’t help being a donkey, they can’t help being full of explosive gas and ridiculously susceptible to the vagaries of the weather. They were hamstrung by the foolishness of man and had to make do.

  I see them as environmentalists might see a whale. Far too large and cumbersome, roaming the vast ocean of air, at the mercy of whatever currents might come their way. And communicating with pigeons in the same idiotic way that a whale communicates by humming. And yet, when you see a whale, and I did once, off Hawaii, you can’t help but stop and gawp.

  They certainly gawped when the Graf flew by on its epic voyage. Half a million turned out to watch it in Tokyo, for instance. And they kept on staring in silent wonderment in the subsequent years as it toured the world, a vast silvery grey advertisement for the Nazis.

  It was, however, the Nazis who killed it off. Goering, displaying the humanitarian streak for which he was so infamous, ordered that the Graf be broken up for scrap. A sad end, and that’s the point. Had it just been another machine no one would give a damn. But we do, for exactly the reason Lady Hay-Drummond-Hay identified back in 1929. The Graf was more than a machine. The Graf had a soul.

  Flying Scotsman

  Trainspotters. You still see them today, occasionally. Hunched over their Tupperware sandwich boxes and their soup at the end of railway
platforms, their anorak hoods pulled tight to keep out the worst of the rain and the wind. And one word comes into your mind: why?

  If I’m drunk, I can just about understand the mentality of the planespotter. There are all sorts of military aircraft to jot down in your notebook. But there are no fighter trains, no stealth locomotives. These days a train is a train is a train. A good train is one that arrives on time; a bad train is one that doesn’t turn up at all.

  In the olden days, when there were lots of different railway companies and no such thing as economies of scale, it was a world of Jenny Agutter appearing out of the steam and Bernard Cribbins watering the station geraniums. Back then there were express trains, and locomotives used to haul coal, and the ones you saw in Yorkshire were completely different from the ones you saw in South Wales. You could meet your weird-beard mates in the snug bar of The Broken Conrod and reminisce about the day you saw the Atlantic Class 4-6-2 in the WRONG livery!!! There was a point to trainspotting. Not a very big one, I admit, and not a very sharp one either, but a point nevertheless.

  Now though, the spottiest teenagers can spend their evenings downloading pornography from the internet. In fact if push came to shove, I bet you could only name one of the 660,000 steam locomotives that have been made around the world.

  The Gresley Pacific 4472. Better known as the Flying Scotsman.

  For those who were born in Doncaster – Kevin Keegan, Diana Rigg and, er, me – it’s a bit galling to know that the town’s most famous son is, in fact, a train, and not a very good one either.

  It was chosen to represent the London & North Eastern Railway company at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, not because it was their finest achievement but because they needed something and the Scotsman was broken at the time.

  After the show it was repaired and selected to represent the LNER again, in a speed-and-economy race against the best of the best from the Great Western Railway. The northern boy turned out to be slower and more coal hungry than its southern rival.

  Of course, the Flying Scotsman’s designers and owners said this was irrelevant. As was the way with the world’s steamship companies, they said they didn’t go in for speed records because this would mean pushing the machinery beyond its limit and that would be dangerous. Yeah right.

  In fact they quietly took their engine back to its Doncaster birthplace and fettled it a bit to make it faster. And what’s more, they fitted a corridor in the coal tender that was dragged behind the engine so the crew could leave the footplate of the locomotive and reach the front carriage without having to stop. This meant driver changes could be done on the move.

  And this meant that in 1928 the Flying Scotsman set a record by doing 392.7 miles from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. Non-stop. In a whisker over eight hours. The press went mad. The public fainted. The Flying Scotsman had started to make a name for itself.

  It was even chosen as the star of Britain’s first ever talking movie, called the Flying Scotsman. I could tell you what it was about. But that would be like trying to explain The Matrix, so I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that as the thirties dawned the Flying Scotsman was a national icon.

  But then disaster. News filtered through from Germany of a new diesel locomotive that had just covered the 178 miles from Berlin to Hamburg at an incredible average speed of 77.4 mph. It was one thing being beaten by a bunch of southern poufs, but quite another being beaten by the Hun.

  So, to show Jerry who was boss, the Flying Scotsman set off for Leeds. It averaged just 72 mph on the way north and failed again on the way south. But while attempting one record it inadvertently broke another. It became the first train, ever, to do 100 mph. 147 tons doing the ton. This time it was a lead item on the BBC’s nine o’clock news and people listening died of excitement.

  After the glory days 4472 became just another train plodding up and down the East Coast line until, by 1961, he was just another engine. He was even overlooked by a commission set up to decide which locomotives should be preserved in museums as diesel took over. They said there was only room for one Gresley Pacific and that would be the Mallard, which held the speed record by that time.

  And so, on 14 January 1963, with a whopping 2.1 million miles on the clock, the Flying Scotsman was withdrawn from service. No one cared. Except for the men on railway platforms, who downed their Tupperware and demanded action. ‘You can’t just scrap him,’ they wailed.

  Happily, their protest reached the attention of a Doncaster boy called Alan Pegler, who bought the engine for £3,000 – only slightly less than half what it had cost to build.

  He carried on running him, as a sort of joyride experience, and I’m glad about that because it meant I got a chance to see him thundering around from time to time. Somewhere, although I’ve no idea where, I have a collection of pennies that I put on the line to be squashed by the Flying Scotsman.

  It’s funny. I was only seven at the time – what were my parents doing allowing me to play on railway lines? – but I knew the Flying Scotsman was special somehow. I didn’t know about the speed and endurance records. I didn’t know about the British Empire Exhibition. And to be honest I preferred the Buck Rogers Deltic diesel engines that were belting through Doncaster in those days.

  And yet, the Flying Scotsman certainly had something. Maybe it’s because he huffed and puffed, giving the sense that a) he was a dragon and that b) he was alive. More likely, though, I was drawn to his beauty.

  Francis Bacon once said there is no beauty that hath not some strangeness to its proportion. Cameron Diaz proves that – she’s got a mouth like a slice of watermelon. But the Flying Scotsman proves it to be wrong. There is no strangeness at all. He is exquisite to behold, partly because he is so nicely balanced and partly because he seems to shout, ‘I AM VERY POWERFUL.’

  Over the years the Flying Scotsman has travelled the world and been owned by pretty well everyone except my wife, and possibly Kate Moss. As I write he’s for sale again, for a not inconsiderable £2.5 million.

  That may seem a lot for something that no longer has a purpose, even if he is a piece of Britain’s engineering heritage. But he is not simply a machine. Like an Aston Martin DB7 or an F-16 fighter, he works as an art form too, a piece of sculpture. So what if you can’t go anywhere in him any more. Put him in your garden and spend your days just looking at him.

  B-52

  In the autumn of 1962 President Kennedy was locked in a bunker discussing the new Russian missiles on Cuba and what might be done about them, President Khrushchev was in Moscow wondering if America’s naval blockade had any teeth, and the world was poised for nuclear war.

  It was a simple problem. The Americans didn’t want Russian missiles 90 miles off the coast of Florida. But the Russians couldn’t see what the problem was since there were American missiles in Turkey, just 150 miles from its own borders.

  Winning this argument meant having a war. So what was needed was a solution where no one lost. And that seemed to be just about impossible.

  Since I was two at the time, my biggest concern was… actually, I can’t remember what my biggest concern was, but it probably had something to do with biscuits. My mum and dad, however, have subsequently admitted that they were crapping themselves.

  I don’t think this shows them to be woolly-headed liberals. They were simply the parents of two small children and felt that both of us were about to be incinerated. This gave them a sense that the misery and pain of childbirth had been for nothing, because everything was about to end.

  Today all we have to worry about are a few disgruntled Algerian youths who maybe have a bit of poison. Back then the world was threatened by two superpowers, each of which had enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world ten times over. It must have been terrifying.

  And the symbol of all this hate and envy between Russia and America has to be the B-52 bomber, a plane conceived and built with only one purpose in mind. To drop atom bombs on men, women and children. So by rights we should look at it today wit
h the same venom and hatred that we look at the swastika.

  And yet.

  A few years ago, long after the Berlin Wall had come down and America and Russia had made public man love, I was at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base just outside Tucson in Arizona. This remarkable place is known as the boneyard because it’s here that the US Air Force stores its unwanted planes.

  The climate is just right – warm and dry – and the soil is heavily alkaline so the aluminium remains untouched by the passage of time. Even the hundred or so F-4 Phantoms that were stored there looked brand spanking new.

  But it was not the condition of the planes that startled me most of all. It was the sheer numbers. Hundreds and hundreds of every conceivable aircraft from bombers to helicopters were lined up, some waiting to be scrapped, some waiting to be sold and some waiting for a war. These had had their sensitive equipment removed, along with all their oils and fluids, and were just sitting there, in the dry desert air, looking rather forlorn.

  But it was at the back of the base, probably five miles from the front entrance, that I found the most amazing sight of them all. A huge guillotine was on its long murderous descent straight into the left wing stem of a B-52 bomber. The massive plane staggered, the wing fell off and then it seemed to stand upright again, waiting for the next blow. This time its other wing was severed, and then the fuselage was simply cut in half.