Good writing can make engineering subjects interesting to general readers. It is no coincidence that two successful examples concern airships. Henning Boetius writes that the German airship Hindenburg "embodied, in a single, magical whole, technological progress, beauty, a grandiose level of human inventive genius, and a vision of global unity".
Neville Shute, acclaimed writer/engineer of the 1950s, worked on the British airship R100. In his book Slide Rule, he says it amounted to "a religious experience" when his calculations proved correct. The ship's "enormous silvery bulk was very beautiful in that misty blue December dawn . . .".
So there was a certain romance, an aesthetic feeling about airships. The 800-feet long Hindenburg could reach New York from Frankfurt in 60 hours, much quicker than ocean liners. Airships were easily seen - altitudes of 200-300 metres high were usual. Older readers may remember the British airship R101 over Dublin about 1929 - a splendid sight.
German airships were surrendered as reparations after the first World War. By 1936, however, airship travel was almost abandoned, except by Germany. Three crashes had finished it in the US. Britain had successfully tested the privately built R100.
The R101, built by the air ministry, left for India without completing trials or an airworthiness certificate. It crashed in France, killing the air minister and 47 others, and ending airships for Britain. Shute's account is still worth reading.
The Phoenix is essentially a work of "faction". Real events and characters are intermingled with fictional ones. Boethius's father operated the Hindenburg's elevators when she mysteriously crashed in New York in 1936. With much "period detail", Boetius maintains a strong narrative thread, albeit with some long monologues. The crash description is a powerful set-piece.
Dr Eckener, Germany's airship organiser, had flown a reparations airship to the US in autumn storms, then circumnavigated the world. Despite this, Boetius shows him on bad terms with the Nazi hierarchy. But his airships were flying on regular schedules to North and South America and elsewhere in the 1930s. Freight, mail and passengers were being reliably delivered, raising German prestige and morale
By 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, the ill treatment of Jews and Hitler's political opponents was underway. The US had effectively banned the export of the non-inflammable helium gas. The hydrogen alternative was highly flammable.
The book is skilfully constructed, starting in 1947 and ending in 1948, with episodes from 1919 to 1938 in between. In the story, Lund, a Swedish passenger, survives the crash. Someone else is buried in his name and he deliberately disappears from his former life. A car accident leaves him facially disfigured. Dissatisfied with the official investigation of the crash, he talks to survivors in the US, Rome and a peculiar Frisian island.
There had been sabotage threats. Lund decides that there was sabotage, but from a surprising source. Telling more would be unfair.
Col E. D. Doyle is an electronic engineer and former Director of Signals