By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, overcast and wet. This morning I have my coffee and a view of the monochromatic marsh.
This morning I’ve been reading a novel titled “No Highway,” written by Nevil Shute. Shute was famous for writing about airplanes in a precise, technical way that required concentration and, sometimes, re-reading to understand the mechanics of flight.
But this was a small price to pay. Shute was an aeronautical engineer by profession and could transfer his professional fascination to the reader making the technology a part of his story-telling.
Shute would usually paint his protagonists as ordinary. In the case of “No Highway,” we get Theo Honey — an obscure, disheveled, slightly eccentric engineer working in a “shabby little shed in the Structural Department of the UK’s Royal Aircraft Establishment.” In our story, Honey is quietly working on “structural metal fatigue” as relates to passenger (jet) airplanes.
He is largely ignored.
The newly hired director (who narrates the story) happens upon Honey asking him what he is does. He learns that the engineer is testing the durability of the stabilizers on the tail of Britain’s newest airliner. This airplane, called the Reindeer, has just been put into transatlantic service and is the pride of the United Kingdom’s worldwide air fleet. Honey calmly says that his preliminary calculations indicate the stabilizers will fail after 1,400 hours of service.
The impending failure of this airplane brings a host of high status characters into the story including ministers, designers and business moguls who downplay the metal fatigue problem wanting to keep Britain’s flagship airline flying and profitable.
Nevil Shute describes the designer, E.P. Pendergast as follows:
“He was deeply religious in a narrow Calvinistic way. He could be in turn a most courteous and charming host, sympathetic and an understanding employer, and a hot tempered fiend capable of making himself physically sick, so that he would stalk out of a conference of bitter, angry words, and retire to the toilet and vomit, and go home to bed, and return to the office three days later, white and shaken with the violence of his illness. He was about the greatest engineer in England at the time. And he produced the most lovely and successful aeroplanes. But he was not an easy man to deal with, E.P. Pendergast.”
Five years after “No Highway” was published there was the first of three crashes of Britain’s de Havilland Comet — a passenger jet put into service by the BOAC after World War II. The most famous crash was just off the coast of Italy on January 10, 1954, when all 35 passengers were killed.
The Comet featured swept-back wings and four jet engines that were concealed inside the wings. It was beautiful to look at and, because there was an emphasis on comfort in those long gone days of extended travel, plenty of leg and head room. But the Comet was put into service with defects.
After the crash, a similar fuselage was submerged into a swimming pool where pressures were increased and decreased. Ultimately BOAC discovered that the riveting around the window frames caused cracks and those cracks probably failed after multiple pressurizations and depressurizations. Future windows would have rounded corners and would be glued into place.
In 1978, Citicorp had just completed its flagship headquarters in Manhattan when a Princeton undergraduate, Diane Hartley, wrote her thesis saying the potential wind loads on this building were incorrectly calculated. It was estimated that a 70 mph wind would topple the skyscraper.
William LeMessurier, one of the original engineers, decided to recalculate the wind loads. When LeMessurier finished his reassessment (at his summer home in Maine) he decided that if there was a power outage together with a strong wind, the Citicorp building would fail once every 16 years.
LeMessurier contemplated suicide knowing that making these new calculations public would ruin his professional reputation. But in the end he contacted Citicorp’s lawyers and the building was reinforced.
May is the month of college commencement speeches and “don’t be afraid to fail” is often a theme.
However good this sounds to the restless grads, professional failure now comes attached to “accountability” which sometimes means resignation and ruin.
Anyone considering fessing-up (to failure) faces the likelihood of lawyers. All of which makes the “fake it until you make it” Silicon Valley mantra appealing to some.
“No Highway” tells the fictional story of an ordinary, underpaid, under appreciated man who tried to do the right thing.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
