Spirit of dubai -The Cardington hangar

The Cardington hangar Bedfordshire - England

For the past few weeks prior to its take-off, the airship was housed in an hangar at RAF Cardington in Bedford, to do all the necessary checks to ensure The Spirit of Dubai is ready for the long journey that lies ahead.

Cardington became one of the major British sites involved in the development of airships when Short Brothers bought land there to build airships for the Admiralty.

They constructed a 700 ft long, 180ft wide and 158 ft high (the No. 1 Shed) in 1915 to enable them to build two rigid airships, the R-31 and the R-32.

Some 800 people worked there in 1917, most of them travelled daily from Bedford. Shorts also built a housing estate, opposite the site, which they named Shortstown.

The airships site was nationalised in April 1919, becoming known as the Royal Airship Works.

	In the middle of the 1920s, the British government decided to build two large airships: the R 100 and the R 101. The political context of this time wanted that the R 100 (proposed by the Conservative) was built by private companies and that the second (proposed by the Labour party) was built thanks to the money of the State.
	Such a technological and political competition did nothing but harm the two airships. Only one crew take on the two vessels because lack of qualified personnel. In preparation for the R101 project the No. 1 shed was extended between October 1924 and March 1926; its roof was raised by 35 feet and its length increased to 812 feet. The No. 2 shed (Southern shed), which had originally been located at Pulham, Norfolk, was dismantled in 1928 and re-erected at Cardington (1929). After the crash of the R101 at Beauvais (France), in October 1930, all work stopped in Britain on airships. The R-100 was dismantled in shed no.2. Cardington then became a storage base.	Empennage arrière du R 101 - crash à Beauvais

	In 1931, the Station was nearly closed, with only a skeleton maintenance staff of some 44 people remaining.

In 1936 / 1937 Cardington started building barrage balloons; and it became the No. 1 RAF Balloon Training Unit.

	The two airship hangars ceased being part of the RAF Cardington site in the late 1940s and they were put to other uses. A company called Airship Industries tried to revive the fortunes of the airship industry in the hangar N°1 in the 1980s, but the company’s demise in 1989 brought another pause in activity at the site. For many years until around 2001, the hangar N°2 was used by the Building Research Establishment as a whole building test facility. The Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was established in 1996 – to continue Airship Industries activity about airship. Following the collapse of ATG, the future of shed 1 remains uncertain. Shed 2, was sold to Warner Brothers and used as film set for the film "Batman Begins". This shed is now up for sale by the film company.