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In the post-war era, Shute retired from his daytime profession and devoted himself to his writing, with many of his stories drawing upon his years in aeronautics, a subject that still a passion. The novel No Highway focused upon the still theoretical idea of metal fatigue. It told the story of a scientist who, convinced of the theory’s validity, fights to ground a new fleet of jet planes in which he perceives a fatal design flaw. No Highway was a critical and a commercial success, and soon optioned for the movies. The film version of the tale, No Highway In The Sky, was produced in Britain and released during June of 1951. During the same period, the de Haviland Company, the same at which Shute had first been employed, designed and put into service the de Haviland Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner. First tested in 1949, the Comet began commercial service in April of 1951, only to suffer the first in a series of fatal crashes during May of 1953.
The positive side-effect of this tragic situation was the rapid development of such skills as underwater search and recovery, and forensic reconstruction, both of which were employed in an attempt to determine the cause of the crashes. However, desperate to protect themselves and their company, the de Haviland directors did not wait for the scientific investigation to conclude, but made a public announcement to the effect that their planes had been modified so as to, “Cover every possibility that imagination has suggested as a likely cause of the disaster.”