before he lands (!), and the book then says after he lands that he switched off the engine. Morris says that he was unpublished so his name would not be known, but earlier it is stated that a paper on fuselages by him has been published. Similarities with the author Stephen Morris himself like Shute starts in the budding British aviation industry after studying at Oxford, though unlike Shute he was a wartime fighter pilot. Riley tells Rawdon that Morris first flew in Rawdon fighters: "Rats and Robins .. then he crashed and became a ferry pilot, and after that he went to the Handley Pages .. he's flown pretty well everything ... He'll be a useful man on the design side ..." Shute’s Great War experience was restricted to training at Woolwich and as a gunner and failing to get a commission, before enlisting "in the ranks" in August 1918 and guarding the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary, plus serving in military funeral parties in Kent during the 1918 flu pandemic. Peter Dennison is also an Oxford graduate, and as Morris says the right sort. Morris and Dennison are both well-educated, but though helped by family connections to get employment do not inherit money. A subplot is marriage and the girl who may not wait until her fiancé can support a family, or may not accompany him to a colonial job. Stephen Morris breaks off with Helen Fisher after he loses a proposed job with prospects with an uncle (an old rubber merchant ) in Malaya. Peter Dennison is turned down by Sheila Wallace when he takes a job in Hong Kong (as a junior partner with his uncle's firm ). Both couples finally reconcile at the end of each book. Characters Stephen Morris, a pilot, was pilot (rank not given) in the war with Malcolm Riley Helen Riley girlfriend of Stephen, was at Oxford with him but is several years younger and hardly more than a girl. Captain Charles G. H. Rawdon of Rawdon Aircraft Co (1919) Ltd, had manufactured aeroplanes before and during the war in Stephen Morris: the two partners in the Isle of Wight Aviation Company are: Stenning, a pilot, was Captain in war, a “plain little man” (Phillip Stenning is a pilot in Marazan) Malcolm Riley a pilot, was Captain in war; plus Sir James Riley, 81, a Conservative politician, father of