Flight of the Titan: The story of the R34

In the early hours of Thursday, July 10, 1919 hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers rushed out onto the streets and rooftops and gaped up into the sky as a great silver ship, hundreds of feet long, rolled slowly across the city. New Yorkers had never seen anything like it. But it was no alien visitation. The huge silver craft, bearing a lion rampant across its bow, was the Scottish-built airship R34 manned by a 30-strong crew of World War I veterans (and a stowaway cat). A few days earlier the R34 had made the first-ever east-west flight across the Atlantic against powerful head winds and electrical storms. In Flight of the Titan George Rosie paints a vivid picture of this great feat of early 19th Century aviation.