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His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine
Maybe someday
48
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
51/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
S.C. Gwynne
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
May 2, 2023
The story of the British airship R101--which went down in a spectacular hydrogen-fueled fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later--has been largely forgotten. In His Majesty's Airship, historian S.C. Gwynne tells the story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.
What The Reviewers Say
Captivating, thoroughly researched.
A Promethean tale of unlimited ambitions and technical limitations, airy dreams and explosive endings. Mr. Gwynne, a journalist and historian, sets the R101’s human and mechanical drama against a flammable backdrop: the longer and similarly disastrous arc of the airship as an alternative to the airplane..
Well-documented.
Gwynne nimbly recounts the odd politics of the construction of R101.
