SS class airship

The SS class, short for Submarine Scout or Sea Scout, was a family of small non-rigid airships, or blimps, that Britain improvised in 1915 to hunt German U-boats and detect mines around its coasts. The prototype was made in under three weeks at Kingsnorth by slinging a stripped B.E.2c aeroplane fuselage and engine beneath an old airship envelope, and the first craft entered service on 18 March 1915. Three car designs followed, the B.E.2c, the Maurice Farman and the Armstrong Whitworth, all carrying a crew of two, a Lewis gun and light bombs under a hydrogen envelope of 60,000 cubic feet. Production was shared between the Royal Aircraft Factory, Kingsnorth, Wormwood Scrubs and the Vickers works at Barrow-in-Furness. In all 158 of the class and its developments were built, and over the last fifteen months of the war they flew more than 10,000 patrols.