AIRSHIP

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. -- Mike Markowitz * 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 *