A complete history of the airship in the early twentieth century from both commercial and military perspectives.
John Swinfield is a former Fleet Street and BBC/ITV reporter and producer with Nationwide (BBC1) and The Money Programme (BBC2). A former editor of the magazine Artists & Illustrators, he was also executive producer of arts and features for an ITV station. He holds an MA in maritime history, his dissertation won the Royal Marine Society prize for postgraduate historical research, and his articles have appeared in periodicals such as History Today.
A fantastic study
*Let's talk book of the month*
Readable, entertaining and authoritative
*Flightpath Magazine*
Excellent book
*Nautilus Telegraph*
Elegant, glamorous and doomed, the romantic appeal of the airship
is hard to resist. Everyone knows the tragic saga of Germany’s
Zeppelins – Hindenburg, like RMS Titanic, is a common metaphor for
disaster – but the story of British airships is equally dismaying.
And the US Navy had its own grim record of airship catastrophes.
This book recounts the sad, brief history of airships, with
particular focus on Britain’s experience. It is a tale of wishful
thinking, bureaucratic cover-up, over-ambitious technology,
ferocious inter-service rivalry, design compromises driven by
cost-cutting accountants, and shattered dreams.
*Defense Media Network*
Airships represent a tremendously appealing, glamorous and perhaps
even romantic technology that has completely failed. Once it was
viewed as incredibly promising and interesting for a wide range of
applications – for military purposes and for long range
transportation of goods and people. Then came the disasters of USS
Akron in 1933 and the huge German Zeppelin LZ129 Hindenburg in 1937
and the rapid development of the airplane, and suddenly the idea of
the airship was dead. 'Born in hope and died in tragedy', as the
author John Swinfield (p.245) so eloquently puts it. Airship is a
great book about the somewhat sad history of airships. The focus is
on Britain’s experience, but there is much also about airships in
America and Germany. I especially liked the many descriptions of
the main characters and personalities that drove the development of
this exciting technology.
*Navyfiction.com*
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