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If you have ever had an interest in the early days of aviation, or seen the huge airship sheds at Cardington and wondered what went on there, then you will find this book of enormous interest.

Nowadays, Nevil Shute is best known as a novelist, but his first career was in aviation, first with De Havilland in 1923 and later the R-100 airship project with the Airship Guarantee Company as Chief Calculator.

The R-100 was a competitor to the R-101, being built by the Royal Airship Works at Cardington. The difficulties of merely constructing such a huge ship with little previous experience are made clear, as well as the anticipated problems of operating it. Despite these, it was built, and after only seven trial flights, the R-101 survived its proving flight to Montreal and back.

The R-101 did not survive its proving flight to India, crashing at Beauvais, and being totally destroyed by the subsequent fire. This first part of his book should be compulsory reading for those planning to build any sort of prototype! The crash of the R-101 was effectively the final blow to a British airship industry, but Nevil Shute went on to become a founder of Airspeed Limited. A

After some years of desperate struggle and narrowly-avoided commercial disasters (fortunately mixed with occasional successes), this company became reasonably successful, supplying an Airspeed Envoy aircraft for the King’s Flight in 1937 and producing increasing numbers of Airspeed Oxford machines for the Air Ministry. The stresses and strains of trying to start and run a business in a technically demanding area are so vividly described that it comes as no surprise to discover that as this book closes, Nevil Shute has decided to leave the aircraft industry and try something else.

Of course, he became quite a success as a writer as well!

PS: The ‘Slide Rule’ of the title was (and is) a handy analog calculating device, using sliding logarithmic scales. It is effective in performing serial multiplication and division with reasonable accuracy. It was probably used in some parts of the design calculations of the R-100, but who in our computer age would dare to design a 709 foot long airship weighing about 100 tons expected to fly to Canada and back, with such a device?

Nevil Shute Vintage Books London ISBN 978-0-0999-53017-6

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