Honey is sent to Canada to examine the debris of the crash, travelling onboard a Reindeer aircraft on which he meets the two heroines of the novel, Corder and Teasdale. Honey's prediction becomes all the more alarming when a Reindeer carrying the Soviet ambassador, with total flying hours close to his estimate, is reported to have crashed over Labrador. While for Honey this seems merely to be an esoteric and engaging problem in pure science, to Scott it is a concern of the first magnitude, as Reindeers are flying across the Atlantic daily, carrying hundereds of passengers. The metal at the root of the tailplane will fatigue and fail with a crystalline fracture. Honey has predicted, by a (fictional) novel theory supposedly related to quantum mechanics, that it is possible for a alloy structure to fail long before the design life predicted by current design standards. The events are narrated by Scott, in the first person, driving the pace of the story.
His current project, overseen by Scott, is to investigate possible failure in the high aspect ratio tailplane of a new airliner, the Rutland Reindeer. The anti-hero of the story, Honey, is engaged in research on the fatigue of aluminium airframes. Monica Teasdale, a middle-echelon Hollywood actress.Marjorie Corder Airline stewardess with the fictional C.A.T.O (Commonwealth Atlantic Transport Organisation).Dennis Scott: Recently appointed head of the structural department at the RAE, a young aeronauticist
Theodore Honey: A recently widowed worker at the Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnborough, Hampshire (RAE).Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find No Highway more, no track, all being blind, The way to go shall glimmer in the mind. The title is taken from the poem The Wanderer by John Masefield: Part of the novel is set in Canada which was very much "the Northern American land of dreams" for Shute since his visit there in the 1930s onboard R100.Ĭold War resonances are apparent in the book through the casting of the Soviet Union as villain. Comet is one of the twelve reindeer that pull Father Christmas' sleigh in Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem A Visit from St. The fictional aircraft of the novel is called a Rutland Reindeer, suggesting allusion to the Comet.
The book was notorious in its time for appearing prescient of the disasters that would befall the de Havilland Comet Mk 1 airliner in the mid- 1950s. No Highway bravely addresses the complex issues of airliner safety at a time when air travel was a much more hazardous experience than it was to become by the end of the 20th century. Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
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