Fatal Flight
The True Story of Britain’s
Last Great Airship
“A fascinating story, not nearly well enough known on the American side of the Atlantic, artfully and engagingly told.” G.J. Meyer New York Times bestselling author of A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1914 to 1918 & The World Remade: America in World War I
“Why does brilliant vehicle design sometimes end in tragedy? The crash of the intended flagship of the British Empire, the magnificent dirigible R.101, is not only an absorbing human and technical story as told by Bill Hammack. It is also a vital lesson in the risks of even apparently small compromises and unforeseen hazards to big projects when confronted by the forces of nature. Impressively documented, Fatal Flight should be required reading for engineers and political leaders alike.” Edward Tenner Author of international bestseller Why Things Bite Back & Our Own Devices
“A well-researched and gripping look at Britain’s greatest airship disaster from a new perspective: through the eyes of a man who built, flew, and died with the ship.” Dan Grossman, Airship Historian author of airships.net and coauthor of Zeppelin Hindenburg: An Illustrated History of LZ-129
Other Books by the Author
Why Engineers Need to Grow a Long Tail
How Engineers Create the World
Eight Amazing Engineering Stories
Albert Michelson’s Harmonic Analyzer
Michael Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle
Copyright © 2017 William S. Hammack
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission from the publisher.
Articulate Noise Books
New York | info@articulatenoise.com
First Edition: June 2017
William S. Hammack
Fatal Flight: The True Story of Britain’s Last Great Airship / Bill Hammack—1st edition (version 1.0)
ISBN 978-1-945441-01-1 (hbk)
ISBN 978-1-945441-02-8 (electronic)
ISBN 978-1-945441-03-5 (pbk)
1. R101 (Airship). 2. Airships—Great Britain—History. 3. Airships—History—20th century. 4. Aircraft accidents. 5. Airships—Design and construction—History. I. Title.
Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping Principle of Judging a work by its Defect, not its Beauties. Every work must have the former—we know it a priori—but every work has not the Latter & he therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty or even with probability have anticipated ….
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, ed. Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 36