The tragic story of the British airship R101-which went down in a spectacular hydrogen-fueled fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later, has been largely forgotten. S.C. Gwynne resurrects it in vivid detail, telling the epic story of great ambition gone terribly wrong. Gwynne's chronicle features a cast of remarkable, and often tragically flawed, characters, including Lord Christopher Thomson, the man who dreamed up the Imperial Airship Scheme and then relentlessly pushed R101 to her destruction; Princess Marthe Bibesco, the celebrated writer and glamorous socialite with whom he had a long affair; and Herbert Scott, a national hero who had made the first double crossing of the Atlantic in any aircraft in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh's famous flight, but who devolved into drink and ruin. These historical figures, and the ship they built, flew, and crashed, come together in a grand tale that details the rocky road to commercial aviation written by one of the best popular historians writing today.