Nevil Shute · 1948 · thriller

Nevil Shute's 1948 novel. A shabby, distracted boffin at Farnborough calculates that the tailplane of a new transatlantic airliner will fail from metal fatigue after fourteen hundred hours. Nobody senior believes him. He is sent to Labrador to examine a crash - and works out mid-flight that the aircraft carrying him has done fourteen hundred and twenty.

1. 1
   Farnborough

   Theodore Honey works at the Royal Aircraft Establishment on metal fatigue, keeps house badly for a motherless daughter and believes several unusual things - and has predicted, on paper, that the Reindeer's tail will come off.

2. 2
   Gander

   He is put aboard a Reindeer to Newfoundland to examine a wreck, and somewhere over the Atlantic gets the aircraft's log hours out of the crew - and realises that this machine is already past the figure in his own calculation.

3. 3
   Goose Bay

   On the ground at Gander, unable to convince anyone and certain the aircraft must not fly again, Honey does the one thing left to him and wrecks the undercarriage from inside the cabin - then is sent on to the Labrador crash site.