His Majesty's Airship
The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine
-
-
4.0 • 28 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
From historian and bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon comes a “captivating, thoroughly researched” (The New York Times Book Review) tale of the rise and fall of the world’s largest airship—and the doomed love story between an ambitious British officer and a married Romanian princess at its heart.
The tragic fate of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty’s Airship, S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.
Airships, those airborne leviathans that occupied center stage in the world in the first half of the 20th century, were a symbol of the future. R101 was not just the largest aircraft ever to have flown and the product of the world’s most advanced engineering—she was also the lynchpin of an imperial British scheme to link by air the far-flung areas of its empire, from Australia to India, South Africa, Canada, Egypt, and Singapore. No one had ever conceived of anything like this, and R101 captivated the world. There was just one problem: beyond the hype and technological wonders, these big, steel-framed, hydrogen-filled airships were a dangerously bad idea.
Gwynne’s chronicle features a cast of remarkable—and tragically flawed—characters, including Lord Christopher Thomson, the man who dreamed up the Imperial Airship Scheme and then relentlessly pushed R101 to her destruction; Princess Marthe Bibesco, the celebrated writer and glamorous socialite with whom he had a long affair; and George Herbert Scott, a national hero who was the first person to cross the Atlantic twice in any aircraft, in 1919—eight years before Lindbergh’s famous flight—but who devolved into drink and ruin. These historical figures—and the ship they built, flew, and crashed—come together in “a Promethean tale of unlimited ambitions and technical limitations, airy dreams and explosive endings” (The Wall Street Journal).
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Pride, alcohol, and a disregard for common sense led to one of England’s most shocking aviation disasters, as historian S. C. Gwynne explains in this colorful and exciting account. In the 1920s, Great Britain devoted massive amounts of time and money to becoming the world leader in the burgeoning industry of airships: lighter-than-air vehicles that used massive hydrogen balloons to lift them off the ground. But the program came to a tragic halt in 1930 with the final voyage of the R101, England’s grandest airship. Gwynne painstakingly reveals how Britain became so entwined in this impractical, failing technology, introducing us to a fascinating cast of real-life characters, including deluded politicians, a glamorous and seductive princess, and a fatally flawed national hero. You don’t have to be crazy about dirigibles to get caught up in this forgotten, enthralling chapter of British history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Gwynne (Empire of the Summer Moon) delivers a fascinating account of the bad decisions, distractions, naivete, and sheer incompetence behind the crash of the massive British airship R101 in a field outside Beauvais, France, in October 1930. In the late 1920s, when airplanes were "uncomfortable, dangerous and in constant need of refueling," England's secretary of state for air, Lord Christopher Thomson, became obsessed with a better alternative: the hydrogen-filled airship. Used as scouts during WWI, hydrogen airships had previously been limited by their flammability, size, and cost. Lord Thomson believed these limits could be overcome, and he set out to build an airship that would connect the British Empire to its many colonies around the world. Interspersing the details of R101's design and construction with the history of zeppelins, Gwynne reveals how Thomson and Royal Airship Works managers doomed the ship by using archaic cattle intestine skins to hold the hydrogen bags, failing to run proper test flights, employing experimental diesel engines, and ignoring weather patterns that predicted massive thunderstorms. Forty-eight people, including Thomson, died in the crash. Meticulously researched and vibrantly written (secured to a mooring mast, the 777-foot-long airship is "a giant silver fish floating weightless in the slate-gray seas of the sky"), this is an immersive and enlightening account of how hubris and impatience can lead to disaster. Photos.
