Fatal Flight audiobook: Closing Credits (14/14)
Ғылым және технология
Download this audiobook, view the figures in the print version, or read the appendices at www.engineerguy.com/airship. Fatal Flight: The True Story of Britain's Last Great Airship is written by Bill Hammack and read by the author.
Fatal Flight brings vividly to life the year of operation of R.101, the last great British airship-a luxury liner three and a half times the length of a 747 jet, with a spacious lounge, a dining room that seated fifty, glass-walled promenade decks, and a smoking room. The British expected R.101 to spearhead a fleet of imperial airships that would dominate the skies as British naval ships, a century earlier, had ruled the seas. The dream ended when, on its demonstration flight to India, R.101 crashed in France, tragically killing nearly all aboard.
Combining meticulous research with superb storytelling, Fatal Flight guides us from the moment the great airship emerged from its giant shed-nearly the largest building in the British Empire-to soar on its first flight, to its last fateful voyage. The full story behind R.101 shows that, although it was a failure, it was nevertheless a supremely imaginative human creation. The technical achievement of creating R.101 reveals the beauty, majesty, and, of course, the sorrow of the human experience.
The narrative follows First Officer Noel Atherstone and his crew from the ship’s first test flight in 1929 to its fiery crash on October 5, 1930. It reveals in graphic detail the heroic actions of Atherstone as he battled tremendous obstacles. He fought political pressures to hurry the ship into the air, fended off Britain’s most feted airship pilot, who used his influence to take command of the ship and nearly crashed it, and, a scant two months before departing for India, guided the rebuilding of the ship to correct its faulty design. After this tragic accident, Britain abandoned airships.
Set against the backdrop of the British Empire at the height of its power in the early twentieth century, Fatal Flight portrays an extraordinary age in technology, fueled by humankind’s obsession with flight.
This audio recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Non-Commercial License.
Book Metadata
Publisher Articulate Noise Books | info@articulatenoise.com
Hardcover | ISBN 978-1-945441-01-1
eBook | ISBN 978-1-945441-02-8
Paper | ISBN 978-1-945441-03-5
Audiobook | ISBN 978-1-945441-04-2
Audience 01 - General Trade
Subjects
HIS015070 HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century
TEC002000 TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Aeronautics & Astronautics
TEC056000 TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / History
SCI034000 SCIENCE / History
Пікірлер: 24
Bill, thank you for this terrific work.
@andrewkovnat
6 жыл бұрын
I couldn't agree more.
@owenari5111
2 жыл бұрын
@Roman Callum Yup, have been using flixzone for months myself :)
@kiangerald4400
2 жыл бұрын
@Roman Callum Yup, been using flixzone for years myself :D
I take a certain dark pleasure in the final line of the book. It has a certain satisfactorily morbid cyclical nature that I quite enjoyed. Excellent book, and I quite enjoyed hearing you read it.
I enjoyed your audiobook very much, thanks for posting. Some years back I happened to be passing Allonne with an hour or two spare. I called into the Mairie and in my schoolboy French asked if someone could show me where the crash site was on my map. Zut alors, better than that, a kind chap showed us the way in his van. The centre of the crash site is marked by a small monument and the site is still recognisable from the 1930 photos. There’s also a larger monument on the main road near Beauvais.
This was an excellent work. And it took me back to early 1967 when my favorite book at the library was called "Giants In The Sky"...several book reports and further research followed over many years...
@engineerguyvideo
3 жыл бұрын
I recall that book!
Awesome work Bill. Very intriguing. Loved the Hindenburg bombshell at the end
@engineerguyvideo
6 жыл бұрын
+Scott Brownlie thanks!
Thank you very much Bill, the descriptions in the book were vivid. It is a wonderful piece of work.
The fascinating thing about the great airships is how rarely (never, basically) they met their demise because of the hydrogen they shipped. That's what everybody remembers today, but in every case I've encountered -- certainly the more sensational ones -- the problem was the fundamental impossibility of controlling something that huge and that light in flight. The essential engineering premise just isn't doable, which of course is why we never went back, even after we developed technologies that would solve many of the secondary problems. But they're still awesome! Sure wish I could have seen one. I'd'a been one of those 400 people still holding on to their zeppelin tickets after the Hindenburg disaster; chance of a lifetime. Thanks for making this in-depth tour of a highly-developed, unique technology we'll never see again available to the public.
This was excellent. I look forward to your future works very much.
Absolutely fascinating, listened to it all in one sitting, many thanks for sharing this incredible story.
@engineerguyvideo
6 жыл бұрын
+Mirodin thx for kind words ... one sitting!
@VeraTR909
6 жыл бұрын
Haha, yeah... I'm at home recovering from an injury so this was a pleasant distraction :)
This was a fantastic reading.
Great book, thanks for sharing!
@engineerguyvideo
6 жыл бұрын
+John Greco thank you -- glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks for the book, it's quite good. Too bad there wasn't more info on the design of R100. It's depressingly familiar to hear about government projects like this one, where the incoming administration wrecks the prior's projects, then runs further things incompetently. If they'd left it alone, maybe R100 would have been a success.
It's weird to click a video and hear the very start of the video is the words "the end". :)
I found his least watched video. This guy deserves at least 1 mil per video
That was a great story to bad about the airship program.
Well researched and analyzed. It provides an example of the diversion of good investment away from good solutions and politically driven obsessions. We have the great advantage of hindsight though. It is likely the British airship would not have been satisfactory no matter how long tests were done, but the rush to meet an imposed schedule from above reminds me of the Challenger Disaster in which the engineers warned NASA the O-rings are likely to fail in cold weather, but there had been too many delays anyway and also the Nedelin Catastrophe in which Kremlin pressure resulted in numerous safety violations including emptying the fuel/oxidizer before working on the rocket and having far too many staff at the site who were not necessary.