The lost flight: A jewel of Scotland's innovative past, but why has the R34 airship been resigned to history?

• The R34 under construction in Glasgow

SIX MINUTES before midnight on Wednesday 10 July, 1919, a Clyde-built airship named the R34 rose into the air above Long Island and made its stately progress over the city of New York.

As the machine, carrying 4,500 gallons of petrol, 230 gallons of engine oil, 30 members of crew and a cat named Whoopsie, flew over the districts of Queens and Brooklyn and finally above the skyscrapers of Manhattan, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets to gaze at the huge silver machine – as long as an ocean liner – that filled the sky.It was, the New York Times reported breathlessly the next day, "one of the finest spectacles New Yorkers had ever seen".

The R34, which made the first ever east-west flight across the Atlantic as well as the first-ever return flight across the pond, is a forgotten chapter in British aviation history. Consigned to the scrapheap just two years after its victorious transatlantic flight, the R34's achievements – it was the longest flight by any aircraft at the time, and the longest time any airship had spent in the air – have been wiped from memories to such an extent that even aviation experts struggle to recognise its name.

Built in Scotland by William Beardmore in Glasgow, manned by a largely Scottish crew and launched from an airfield in East Lothian, it should have been a matter of national pride, yet its only remembrance today is a cafe/restaurant with the same name at Inchinnan, near where the airship was built. So why has this titan of the sky – a Scottish Hindenburg with a happy ending – been allowed to be forgotten?

Just several weeks before the R34's double transatlantic voyage, John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the first non-stop transatlantic flight in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber plane, becoming overnight celebrities and putting aviation in the national headlines. George Rosie, whose new book about the R34, Flight of the Titan, attempts to shed light on the forgotten airship, believes the R34 and its crew were – to a certain extent – victims of circumstance.

"In the public eye they were somewhat overshadowed," says Rosie, "Alcock and Brown had been given massive publicity just a few weeks previously, and they were knighted. But with the R34 that just didn't happen. I've heard it suggested that they were such a huge deal in the United States that they were always going to receive a muted reception when they came back. And then there's the theory that Churchill was so opposed to airships that he worried if it got huge public acclaim that they might have to build more of them."

The R34 was conceived as a warship. Built on Clydeside by Beardmore while the First World War still raged in Europe, it was constructed at a time when it seemed that airships, which used far less fuel than planes or ships – might be the future of transport both military and civilian. By the time construction was finished, however, the Great War was over, and the RAF needed something to do with it. The idea to send it across the Atlantic was conceived.

The crew consisted of 30 airmen, many of them grizzled war veterans for whom nothing was too much of a challenge, and the driving force behind the R34 was Brigarider-General Edward Maitland, a veteran of the Boer War, the First World War and one of Britain's first aeroplane pilots.

"Maitland was a very interesting figure," says Rosie. "He was one of those imperial warrior adventurer figures, the first man to jump in a parachute from 11,000 feet, and always immaculately dressed and very dapper. He struck me as being like a TE Lawrence of the air." During the voyage Maitland kept scrupulous – and highly entertaining – logs of the journey documenting the experience of flying across the treacherous Atlantic in an airship.

Just after taking off from East Fortune Airfield in East Lothian on Wednesday 2 July, 1919, he wrote the following. "All is now more or less plain sailing, as we can make out the Firth of Forth. Passing over Forth Bridge and Rosyth, which shows up clearly – a blaze of lights… Rosyth is a beautiful sight – a fairyland of lights. Ships in docks and ships moored in Firth plainly visible."But the journey was far from, as Maitland put it "plain sailing". The airship battled strong headwinds and a fuel shortage, as well as violent squalls and the occasional leak.

At one point, Maitland recorded too the crew's first sighting of icebergs in the North Atlantic, the first time they had been seen from the air and at a time when the sinking of the Titanic was a fresh and disturbing memory. "Looking down upon this huge iceberg from the open window of the forward car we can clearly see treacherous green ice protruding under the water in all directions," Maitland wrote.

"As this underwater ice could, under no circumstances, be seen from a surface ship, it brings home to one the hidden dangers that ocean-going vessels are liable to meet within this portion of the Atlantic."

The R34 even had its own stowaway. William Ballantyne, a 22-year-old Aircraftman second class was bumped off the crew at the last minute to make way for a US observer, but decided to sneak onboard anyway, even if it meant risking a court martial. He was discovered after 12 hours between two of the ships' gas bags, violently sick after breathing in small quantities of hydrogen, and assigned to grunt duties onboard for the rest of the trip, such as peeling potatoes.

There was also a feline stowaway, in the shape of the unfortunately named Whoopsie, a cat that had been rescued from the streets of Renfrew, brought to the airfield and had later hidden away onboard. On their arrival in the US, both Ballantyne and Whoopsie became celebrities in their own right in the American press, although only Whoopsie – whom one Broadway actress offered the crew $1,000 for and was turned down – was allowed to make the trip home via the R34, with Ballantyne made to find other means of transport as penance.

Their reception in New York was rapturous, with the crew treated to fine dinners and nights out, while one American paper, the Brooklyn Eagle, took the opportunity to lambast the US military for not having produced something similar in stature to the R34.

On their return home, while New York peered up in wonder at the R34, the crew too, stared down in amazement. "The Times Square, Broadway, is a remarkable sight – we see thousands of upturned faces in spite of the early hour, and the whole scene is lit up by the gigantic electric sky signs, which seem to concentrate about this point." Maitland wrote in his log.

But, returning home on Sunday 13 July to an English airfield, rather than the planned Scottish one, the reception at home was muted, and certainly nothing like the lavish ceremonies that had been laid on in America. In the months afterwards Maitland continued to be an enthusiastic fan of the airship, giving speeches in which he predicted it would be the premier mode of transport of the future. But in 1921, his life was tragically cut short when he, along with several other crew members of the R34 were killed when, on 23 August, its sister ship, the R38, was destroyed by a structural failure over Hull, killing 44 or the 49 crew on board.

When another airship, the R101 crashed in October 1930 on its maiden voyage killing 48 people including a senior government minister, it signalled the death knell for the British airship industry. After the Hindenburg famously suffered a similar fate in 1937, airships were abandoned, consigned to romantic history. But, says Rosie, they still – the R34 in particular, which was scrapped in the early 1920s – leave their legacy.

"If you can solve the problem of making them weatherproof they are still an interesting piece of technology. The US military are now very intriuged by the prospect of getting a huge airship to lift tanks and thousands of men because it's faster than ships and so much cheaper. That's its legacy. The idea is still there."

And there is a parallel to be drawn, he says, between airships, Scotland's R34 and another titan of 20th century aviation.

"Like Concorde they had about 20 years of doing well and then one particular crash ended it," he says. "With both there was a time when it looked like the way ahead. In fact, it proved just not to be."

• Flight of the Titan, The Story of the R34 by George Rosie is published by Birlinn priced 9.99