Rajay wrote:
Garbs wrote:
I also remember that the failure mode for the "Reindeer" tail assemblies in "No Highway In The Sky" was some form of vibration-induced cold fusion. That's the one where Jimmy Stewart played a boffin in the RAE at Farnborough, was it?
What I remember from that movie was that the "Reindeer" must not have been equipped with a simple squat switch - Jimmy Stewart pulled the gear handle on the ground and the gear just folded right up!
On the other side of things though, I found either the movie or its writer, Nevil Shute, to be amazingly prescient because it was released about 18 months BEFORE DeHavilland Comet airliners started to experience in-flight break-ups that were eventually attributed to structural fatigue related to pressurization cycles and the infamous square windows.
The movie was released on Sept. 21, 1951 according to IMDB.
In October 1952 and March 1953, Comets had a take-off accidents (one in Rome and one in Karachi, Pakistan) in which they failed to achieve lift and ran off the end of the runway. The second one killed all 11 people on board.
On May 2, 1953, a Comet en-route from Calcutta, India flew into a thunderstorm a few minutes after take-off and broke up, killing 43 people.
On Jan. 10, 1954, 20 minutes after taking-off from Rome (again!), another Comet broke up in flight and fell into the sea near the island of Elba, killing 35.
A couple of months later, on April 4, 1954, still another Comet crashed into the sea near Naples, Italy, killing 21. This time around, it was a BOAC charter flying from Rome (again for the third time!) to Cairo.
What an auspicious start to the jet airline industry! Fortunately for ALL of us, Nevil Shute wasn't so "prescient" with his script for
On the Beach and we all managed to survive the Cold War without blowing up and contaminating the whole Northern Hemisphere.
Nevil Shute Norway didn't 'write a movie' but wrote a book;
No Highway pubished in 1948 from which a movie was later made. AFAIK Shute had
no involvement with the script of the film, and has significant deviations from Shute's much more carefully structured story.
As an experienced aircraft designer, he knew his stuff, but his 'prescience' is often mentioned in connection with the Comet accidents, and this coincidence is overstated. Yes, both cases involve metal fatigue, but as Shute himself pointed out his work of fiction does not aim to predict a new problem with pressurisation, but is one (of several) plot devices for a fictional narrative - that included mumbo-jumbo supernatural elements just as crucial, and always glossed over when this connection is made. In his work (rather than the derivative film) the engineer anti-hero is something of a nut, and (for instance) during a flight on the aircraft, works out the tail failure to an exact number of hours flown; something than NSN would've well known was impossible. You could just as well connect the story to the loss of the tail structure through buffeting of Junkers F.13 G-AAZK over Meopham in Kent in
1930 - but that won't give the delightful shiver to those who don't understand coincidence.
Nevil Shute was a remarkable writer and arguably the most important writer of fiction with a first-hand understanding of aircraft design and engineering; several of his works containing significant and more credible aviation elements than
No Highway. Like any other good writer, basing one's opinion on his work from the movies is like knowing Shakespeare from buying the T shirt. Most of his books are recommended to anyone who really understands their aviation (
Trustee from the Toolroom being my favourite) and his autobiography
Slide Rule is an excellent firsthand account of one of the greatest periods of aviation development from an insider.
Best thing to take from this is to read one of Shute's works. As in this thread's subject,
his deviations from reality were conscious decisions, and made by an expert aviator
and storyteller. What more can you ask for?
http://www.nevilshute.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_ShuteRegards,
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