Allusions/references To Actual History, Geography and Current Science
Part of the novel is set in Canada (and in Newfoundland, which had not yet become a part of the Canadian Confederation), which was very much "the Northern American land of dreams" for Shute following his visit there in the 1930s on board R100.
Shute's fictional account of a new airliner design being subject to mechanical failure due to metal fatigue after a certain number of flight cycles presaged the similar failures of the de Havilland Comet airliner just six years later. There are many parallels between the novel and the later real-life disasters, surely the result of one aeronautical engineer/author working out the possibilities, which a real and similar design then experienced. (A coincidence has been observed between the aircraft names, the fictional Reindeer and the real-life Comet, "Comet" being in poetry the name of one of Santa Claus's reindeer, but the Comet was named for the prewar de Havilland DH.88 racing aircraft.)
Some readers have suggested Shute may have been influenced in his description of the crash site by the 1946 crash at Hare Mountain (later Crash Hill), Newfoundland, of a Douglas C-54E which killed 39 people. More information on this crash is at http://www.heritage.nf.ca/society/stephenville/crash-hill.html
Read more about this topic: No Highway
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