Rose does a fantastic job explaining how the airship, once considered the future of long-distance transportation, was overtaken by the airplane by recounting the pitched battle between Dr. Hugo Eckener, father of Germany’s Graf Zeppelin, and Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways.
This book reads like an un-put-downable thriller sharing previously unknown information about the golden days of airship travel while revealing the fascinating character of two men who simply refused to give in. The chapters on how Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s Luftschiffbau Zeppelin rose to become the undisputed leader in commercial airship travel are particularly strong.
The Golden Age of Aviation is brought to life in this story of the giant Zeppelin airships that once roamed the sky—a story that ended with the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg.
“Genius . . . a definitive tale of an incredible time when mere mortals learned to fly.”—Keith O’Brien, The New York Times
At the dawn of the twentieth century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world’s first successful flying machine. As the Wrights labored to invent the airplane, Zeppelin fathered the remarkable airship,…
Few Americans are aware of the grandiose ambitions of Great Britain’s Imperial Airship Scheme or its tragic consequences.
Gwynne does a terrific job recapturing all the glamour and folly involved in this important but little-known undertaking. Designed to connect England’s major colonies, including Canada, Africa, Australia, and India, by regularly scheduled airship travel, the Imperial Airship schemed resulted in two gigantic, big-rigid airships: the R100 and R101. One set out and successfully completed a transatlantic trip to Canada and back, promising great things to come, while her sister ship embarked on a voyage from England to India a few months later with Titanic-like consequences.
Reads like an aerial Poseidon Adventure, only it’s all true. Comes with my money-back-guarantee of satisfaction!
From the bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon comes a stunning historical 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 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 resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong.…
Most people think that the first person to conquer the North Pole was either Cook, Peary, or Byrd. The correct answer is none of them. The first persons to indisputably reach the North Pole were Roald Amundsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, and Italian General Umberto Nobile aboard the Norge, a semi-rigid airship designed by Nobile and built in Italy.
This book tells the story of Nobile’s second expedition to the North Pole, which crashed on the icepack upon its return. General Nobile, accompanied by a handful of survivors and his little dog, Titina, is stranded and gravely injured while the world undertakes a seemingly impossible rescue mission akin to finding a needle in a haystack. The rescue effort, which involved an eccentric American woman, and the death of Amundsen, is grippingly recounted as the hours tick down.
A tale of courage, hubris, and determination in the unforgiving polar environment, the surprise ending is worth the price of the book.
"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…
My book tells the true but little-known story of the USS Macon (ZRS-5), the world’s largest, most expensive, and most technologically advanced airship of her day.
It’s also the story of the four men responsible for conceiving, designing, building, and flying her. A tale of physical courage, engineering acumen, ugly politicking, and two egregious disasters, this book is a thrilling adventure story that reveals for the first time what really happened to bring the golden age of airships to a tragic close.
