Flight to Mons

by Alexander Fullerton

Book Overview

When young Charlie Holt is chosen to take an airship to France in order to bring out a young girl and her mother, the motive for the challenge is intelligence- the girl has befriended a German officer... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0751534986
• ISBN13: 9780751534986
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Time Warner Books UK
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.3" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

Puts you in the cockpit

Wonderful adventure about Britain's small military airships of World War I. Prolific Fullerton is reknown for his accurate technical detail, and he gives you enough here to put you uncomfortably in the open-air cockpit of a hydrogen-filled blimp hunting submarines at 6,000 feet over the English channel and on into occupied France for a little espionage. Brave men, flying with no parachutes (few available yet) in what amounted to a biplane's fuselage, stripped of its wings, suspended beneath the highly-inflamable (even explosive) gas bag by a series of occasionally unreliable wires. With the primitive forecasting of the day, the weather could be their worst enemy. These machines exist only in photos today, and not many of those. But quite a lot of historical material is on the Web about the little and big airships, which were improved from about 1913 until the 1930s when airplanes had advanced enough to make the blimps fairly impractical, due to their dangerous hydrogen gas. Think of the Hindenberg disaster, and others less well known.