The lead ship, R.33, served successfully for ten years and survived one of the most alarming and heroic incidents in airship history when she was torn from her mooring mast in a gale.

[2] The existing design was adapted to produce a new airship based on the German craft and two examples were ordered, one (R.33) to be constructed by Armstrong-Whitworth at Barlow, North Yorkshire, and the other (R.34) by William Beardmore and Company in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, Scotland.

The control car was well forward on the ship, with the aft section containing an engine in a separate structure to stop vibrations affecting the sensitive radio direction finding and communication equipment.

One of these, a flight promoting "Victory Bonds" even included a brass band playing in the top machine gun post.

In June 1921 it was used by the Metropolitan Police to observe traffic at The Derby,[6] and in July she appeared in the Hendon Air Pageant before flying to Cardington, Bedfordshire, where she was laid up for three years.

The crew on board started the engines, gaining some height, and rigged a cover for the bow section, but the R.33 was blown out over the North Sea.

She was then able to slowly make her way back home, arriving at the Suffolk coast eight hours later and reaching Pulham at 13:50 hrs, where she was put into the shed alongside the R.36.

In 1926, she launched a pair of Gloster Grebes weighing about a ton apiece, the first of which was flown by Flying Officer Campbell MacKenzie-Richards.

After cruising as far south as Yorkshire R.34 returned to East Fortune to dock at about 3 p.m.[11] The airship made her first endurance trip of 56 hours over the Baltic from 17 to 20 June.

[12] R.34 had never been intended as a passenger airship and extra sleeping accommodation for the crew was arranged by slinging hammocks along the keel walkway.

[15] As the landing party had no experience of handling large rigid airships, Major E. M. Pritchard jumped by parachute and so became the first person to reach American soil by air from Europe.

This was the first East-West aerial crossing of the Atlantic and was achieved weeks after the first transatlantic aeroplane flight by British aviators Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown in a modified First World War Vickers Vimy.