Airshipwreck

The age of the commercial airship was short-lived, for scarcely more than a quarter of a century. In that time, the incidence of disastrous failure was high. Although comparatively few fare-paying passengers lost their lives in airship wrecks, fatalities among the machines out-number the airships that survived to pass into honourable retirement. Yet Len Deighton calls the airship one of the greatest triumphs of structural engineering the world has seen. Through this remarkable collection of photographs, many of them never published before, he bears witness to the magic of those gentle, awesome giants of the sky - 'cathedral arches twisted into a tracery of aluminium'.

Just two years before World War ll and the demise of the airship, the only regular Passenger flights between Europe and North America or Brazil were by luxuriously appointed and noiseless noiseless airships sauntering gracefully at low enough altitude for navigation by road maps. Even as early as 1912, passengers could relax in their wicker armchairs on the carpeted flight deck after an excellent cold lunch aboard the postal delivery zeppelin and watch the German countryside unroll beneath them at a steady 45miles per hour.