John Geoghegan – When Giants Ruled the Sky

In When Giants Ruled the Sky, John Geoghegan tells the true but little-known story of the USS Macon (ZRS-5), the world’s largest, most expensive and most technologically advanced airship of her day, and the four men responsible for conceiving, designing, building, and flying her. In doing so it reveals how the American airship came within a hair’s breadth of replacing planes, trains, and ocean liners as the dominant form of long-distance transportation, and exactly what went wrong, a tale of physical courage, engineering acumen, ugly politicking and two egregious disasters.
John J. Geoghegan began his career as a Special Correspondent for the New York Times.