R33-class airship

The R.33 class was a pair of British rigid airships ordered for the Royal Naval Air Service in the First World War and finished only after the war, when the service had become part of the Royal Air Force. The design was adapted from the captured German Zeppelin LZ 76 (L 33), which had been examined for five months. R.33 was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Barlow in North Yorkshire and R.34 by William Beardmore at Inchinnan in Renfrewshire, and five 275 hp Sunbeam Maori engines drove each ship. R.33 first flew on 6 March 1919 and served for ten years, surviving being torn from her mooring mast in a gale in April 1925, before she was scrapped in 1928. R.34 flew from East Fortune in Scotland to Long Island in July 1919, the first east to west transatlantic flight and the first aircraft to carry passengers across the Atlantic, and with the return flight made the first two-way crossing. She was scrapped after storm damage in 1921.