No Highway

This the sort of book I love to read over and over again every few years. I was exhausted this weekend and enjoyed reading this book lazily. I worked in the garden, made and ate a scone and read No Highway. It is an old fashioned novel slowly tells the tale if a "Boffin" a lonely scientist , his boss who is the narrator and what happens when research collides with life. IN the early 50's Mr. Honey predicts the tail of a certain type of aircraft will fall off. Unfortunately this same type of aircraft is flying across the Atlantic. Lives are at stake and the pure research of Mr. Honey becomes critical as does the character of Mr. Honey. He has a daughter and not one but two unlikely love love interests. The is a happy ending and all is well. but the charm of this kind of novel is you are drawn into the life of some likable people. I enjoyed the visit.

This is one of Neville Shute's best novels (I keep saying that) and a pretty good movie was made of it with Jimmy Stewart, Glynis Johns and Marlene Dietrich. The story is about a shy and rather homely aircraft engineer who was widowed in the war and lives with his eight year old daughter. He is reclusive and not very well liked by his bosses but he is brilliant. He has a theory about metal fatigue and is using a tail plane from the brand new British trans-Atlantic airliner as a test bed. It hasn't occurred to him that the test, if successful, will result in grounding the fleet of planes. Then, he learns that one of the airliners has crashed in Canada and he is asked to go to the crash site to see if the tail is intact. He is an "inside man" and doesn't want to go but he is "volunteered" by his boss. Flying across the Atlantic at night, he is horrified to learn that not only is this one of the "Reindeer" airliners but it has exceeded the safe number of flying hours according to his calculations. Upset, he confides his fears to a famous movie actress who is on the flight and who was a favorite of his late wife. The stewardess tries to discourage him from upsetting the passengers but both women begin to fear he knows what he is talking about. They make it to the fuel stop at Gander but, to prevent the plane taking off again, he pulls the lever on the undercarriage, causing the plane to settle down onto the taxiway. A furious row ensues and the story is an enjoyable scientific adventure story and a romance as both women because very attracted to this shy engineer. I read this book in the 1940s when it came out and, shortly after it was published, the British Comet jet airliners began to crash. The cause was metal fatigue. Shute was an experienced aeronautical engineer who had built up his own company before the war. He knew his subject. The book is excellent. This should be on every list of novels for engineers.

This 1948 novel was one of the first adult books I read as a boy; remembering it fondly, I wanted to see how it stood up now. The brief answer: very well, although it shows its age. Such a book could never be published today, and in many ways that is a pity. Nevil Shute Norway was an aircraft engineer by profession, and most of his novels (of which A TOWN LIKE ALICE is the best-known) touch to some degree on flying; in NO HIGHWAY, aircraft engineering is the entire background. The narrator, Dennis Scott, is head of a research department at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, England. One of his scientists, a rather unworldly widower named Theodore Honey, is convinced that Britain's latest transatlantic passenger aircraft, the Reindeer, is liable to catastrophic metal fatigue in the tail after so many hours' flying time, and convinces Scott that all Reindeers must be grounded before they approach that maximum. Unfortunately, two aircraft have already reached the danger point. One has recently crashed in a remote area of Labrador, and when Honey is sent out to investigate, he discovers he is traveling in the other one. Shute's strength is that he writes what he knows, straightforwardly and without frills. He assumes that the reader will be interested in the technology, and in the bureaucratic procedures that Scott must go through to convince the appropriate agencies of the danger. It is true that some of Honey's theories sound kooky, to put it mildly, and it is hard to believe that time-to-fracture is as predictable as he makes out. But in 1954, six years after the book was published, Britain's Comet fleet, the world's first commercial passenger jet aircraft, suffered a series of fatal accidents that were ultimately put down to metal fatigue; the episode essentially ended Britain's domination of the transatlantic market. That era was about to change anyhow; one of the pleasures of the book is to go back before the jumbo jet, when transatlantic aircraft has to refuel at places like Gander in Newfoundland, and carried only a few dozen passengers in easy luxury. NO HIGHWAY is also a heart-warming love story. This requires some suspension of contemporary cynicism, for Shute's character painting (especially his women, often referred to as "girls") now seems rather simplistic, in common with many of the popular writers of his generation. They don't write them like that any more -- with one notable exception: I suspect that the popularity of Alexander McCall Smith (author of THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB) is precisely because he too writes in the simple emotional terms of his boyhood reading. If you want Smith's warmth applied to more boyish subjects, you might do worse than look into Shute.

When Dr. Theodore Honey, a boffin of an aviation scientist, predicts that the wings on a new type of aircraft will begin falling off, he is sent across to Canada to investigate a previous crash. Bad choice--he is so unimpressive that when he learns that the aircraft he is on has already exceeded his estimated time to failure, he can only stop the flight by wrecking it when it stops to refuel at Gander. Almost everyone believes he's crazy except for a few--including the assistant director at his place of work, a stewardess, and a movie actress. Shute is at his best in his characterizations--such as Monica Teasdale the fading American movie actress, who falls in love with Honey as she once did with a man before she became famous. She soon realizes she can never have Honey and must step aside for the stewardess, who can give him children and maintain him in his work, as well as give him love. The details are amusing--the actress, from Indiana, uses the word "hoosier" to the mystification of the British charactersAs in most of Shute's books, there are no villians. The fact that many of the characters are working against each other does not make any of them evil, and when the truth is revealed, they quickly begin to work together. For the information of readers, the book made a fairly poor movie starring (I kid you not), Jimmy Stewart as Honey. But as so few of Shute's books were made into movies, it is worth watching for that reason.

...after all, this is an age of cynicism. It's the story of nerdy scientist Theodore Honey (the British term of that time was "boffin"--it specifically targeted scentists) who discovers a potentially deadly flaw in a new airliner. The problem is that nobody but his boss Dr. Scott (from whose viewpoint this story is told) has any faith in his theory. After all, oddballs don't have very high credibility factors. So Scott sends Honey over to Canada to investigate a recent crash of one of those planes, only to have it turn out that the plane he takes is also one of that model. Which makes for a particularly gripping scene--it's the centerpiece of the James Stewart movie based on this book. Other important characters here are Honey's motherless daughter, an actress he's a fan of who's also on the flight--he reminds her of an old friend she knew before she became famous, the plane's captain who is increasingly unsure that Honey is a crackpot, plus a stewardess who not only shares her captain's point of view--but finds Honey strangely compelling in an even more important way. Nowadays you don't often find this human a story in so short a book. Shute's best known book is "On The Beach".