His Majesty's Airship

His Majesty's Airship PDF Author: S. C. Gwynne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982168285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book 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).

His Majesty's Airship

His Majesty's Airship PDF Author: S. C. Gwynne
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982168285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book 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).

Report on Civil Aviation, Including Civil Operations for Other Government Departments Undertaken by the Royal Canadian Air Force for the Year ...

Report on Civil Aviation, Including Civil Operations for Other Government Departments Undertaken by the Royal Canadian Air Force for the Year ... PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics, Commercial
Languages : en
Pages : 908

Get Book Here

Book Description


Press Releases

Press Releases PDF Author: United States. Department of State
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Get Book Here

Book Description


N-4 Down

N-4 Down PDF Author: Mark Piesing
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062851543
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Get Book Here

Book Description
"GRIPPING. ... One of the greatest polar rescue efforts ever mounted." —Wall Street Journal The riveting true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history: the desperate race to find the survivors of the glamorous Arctic airship Italia, which crashed near the North Pole in 1928. Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries . . . During the Roaring Twenties, zeppelin travel embodied the exuberant spirit of the age. Germany’s luxurious Graf Zeppelin would run passenger service from Germany to Brazil; Britain’s Imperial Airship was launched to connect an empire; in America, the iconic spire of the rising Empire State Building was designed as a docking tower for airships. But the novel mode of transport offered something else, too: a new frontier of exploration. Whereas previous Arctic and Antarctic explorers had subjected themselves to horrific—often deadly—conditions in their attempts to reach uncharted lands, airships held out the possibility of speedily soaring over the hazards. In 1926, the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen—the first man to reach the South Pole—partnered with the Italian airship designer General Umberto Nobile to pioneer flight over the North Pole. As Mark Piesing uncovers in this masterful account, while that mission was thought of as a great success, it was in fact riddled with near disasters and political pitfalls. In May 1928, his relationship with Amundsen corroded beyond the point of collaboration, Nobile, his dog, and a crew of fourteen Italians, one Swede, and one Czech, set off on their own in the airship Italia to discover new lands in the Arctic Circle and to become the first airship to land men on the pole. But near the North Pole they hit a terrible storm and crashed onto the ice. Six crew members were never seen again; the injured (including Nobile) took refuge on ice flows,unprepared for the wretched conditions and with little hope for survival. Coincidentally, in Oslo a gathering of famous Arctic explorers had assembled for a celebration of the first successful flight from Alaska to Norway. Hearing of the accident, Amundsen set off on his own desperate attempt to find Nobile and his men. As the weeks passed and the largest international polar rescue expedition mobilized, the survivors engaged in a last-ditch struggle against weather, polar bears, and despair. When they were spotted at last, the search plane landed—but the pilot announced that there was room for only one passenger. . . . Braiding together the gripping accounts of the survivors and their heroic rescuers, N-4 Down tells the unforgettable true story of what happened when the glamour and restless daring of the zeppelin age collided with the harsh reality of earth’s extremes.

Press Releases

Press Releases PDF Author: United States. Dept. of State
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1116

Get Book Here

Book Description


Fatal Flight

Fatal Flight PDF Author: Bill Hammack
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781945441035
Category : Aircraft accidents
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
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, but R.101 flew again, its scrap melted down and sold to the Zeppelin Company, who used it to create LZ 129, an airship even more mighty than R.101--and better known as the Hindenburg. 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

R101

R101 PDF Author: Nick Walmsley
Publisher: Sutton Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
His Majesty's Airship R101 was intended to be an aerial flagship, connecting the far-flung outposts of the Empire in a fraction of the time it took to make a sea voyage. Her story is one of grand dreams and fine ideas, brilliant technology, political and romantic intrigue, human weakness, heroism and ultimate tragedy. The ill-starred career of the gigantic airship and her horrific fiery end on a French hillside exert the same kind of fascination reserved for the Titanic and the Hindenburg. Her loss in 1930 sent the nation into shock, marking the end of Britain's interest in airships and even perhaps representing the death throes of the imperial dream. This pictorial history of the airship is based on the archives of the Airship Heritage Trust. These include the records of the Royal Airship Works, which built the R101 and have previously denied all access.

Bibliographie de la Vie Militaire Au Canada, 1867-1995

Bibliographie de la Vie Militaire Au Canada, 1867-1995 PDF Author: O. A. Cooke
Publisher: Directorate of History and Heritage, Department of National Defence = Direction--Histoire et patrimoine, Ministère de la défense nationale
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description
Canadian military history and military matters have not been well represented in general in retrospective bibliographies of Canadian or in international military bibliographies. What has been attempted in this document is a bibliography of published primary sources and secondary works on Canadian military topics, excluding poetry and fiction, covering the period from Confederation to the present. Entries in the bibliography represent printed monographs, books and pamphlets, and serial titles. The prime criteria of inclusion were that the work be chiefly or uniquely both Canadian and military in its contents. Many in-house publications, of the training pamphlet or regulations type, have been included, but only insofar as they tell us something of the armed forces themselves, rather than details of tactical doctrine or of pieces of equipment. Works by or about Canadians serving with the armed forces of other countries have been included, as well as materials relating to the military history of Newfoundland since 1867.

Bibliography of Aeronautics

Bibliography of Aeronautics PDF Author: United States. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book Here

Book Description


Aero Digest

Aero Digest PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 964

Get Book Here

Book Description