Stupple, Edward James Frederick. Charge Hand Engineer. RAF Service Nbr. 205340. (B. around 1897). Stupple joined the RNAS in Jan. 1915 and was flying in airships out of Kingsnorth by March. Over time served on several airships: HMA Astra-Torres 3, SS4, SS12, the first British Parseval, SSZ1, SSZ2, some of the SST airships, HMA No. 23, 24, 25, R29, R31, R33, R36 and R100 (the latter he was LAC 2nd Engineer).
He lamented that when on long anti-submarine patrols in WWI, if you were flying in the last blimp to land, that guaranteed you were the first airship to leave on patrol the next morning. During patrols of the Channel between Dover and Belgium, his airship was fired upon a number of times, fortunately without harm. He noted that at one time they encountered a German aeroplane, but the crew simply waved “Hello” and never fired upon them.
He was present as part of the R33 crew during all of her mooring trials, and when she broke away from the Pulham mast during a storm in 1925, he literally had just stepped off the ship onto the mast and missed the inadvertent flight by a second. He declined service on the R101, feeling much more comfortable with the Rolls Royce engines of R100, and participated in all test flights of that airship. By the time the airship program had ended, he had accrued over 15,000 hours of flying time.