Half an hour after appearing high over our washing line a giant followed us down to the pub. The church bells next door rang eight, the air was mosquito-still and then an all-consuming bass rumble filled the sky.
A puffed up grey cloud three times the length of a blue whale came overhead. People sitting at the neighbouring table glanced up, then went back to their drinks.
A whale is so enormous that it is sometimes hard to believe it is a living thing. This airship was so big that it was hard to believe it was not. Humming to itself, hanging over the beer garden, the vessel was a beast with its own character.
There were no heads on show in its gondola, a lozenge held flat against the ship’s base, so it was easy to forget that it had human intelligence.
This hybrid airship-plane, a balloon with duckling wings, is, at 92 metres long, the world’s largest aircraft. Though officially named the Airlander 10 a kink of underside cleavage inspired locals to call it the flying bum and the name has stuck.
I’d last seen this putative freight carrier on a test flight when I was standing in a wheat field trying to locate a trilling yellowhammer, minutes before it made a gentle crash landing. Then, as now, the airship, full of helium and personality, appeared to be showing an interest. Its conical nose inclined towards the ground as if watching and listening too. Now I imagined it wanted to be included in the next round of drinks.
Shifting almost imperceptibly, its movements slow and benign, the airship turned for home. Home is Cardington airfield, where, a 100 years ago, Short Brothers started work on a British answer to the Zeppelin.
Various iterations followed, including the R101, the Titanic of the skies, which went down in flames on its maiden flight over France; their story is documented in the Blue Sky Thinking exhibition at The Higgins Bedford museum (until 17 September).
The last time an airship flew in this area was two years before our barmaid was born, yet she showed a matter-of-fact nonchalance about this colossal ship’s presence. How quickly the magnificent becomes the mundane.
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