Imperial 109, one of the most beautiful and best loved aircraft ever built, was a flying boat of Britain’s Imperial Airways. In grandeur and luxury she carried mail, cargo and passengers from Durban in South Africa to Cairo, on through Greece and Italy to London and then across the Atlantic to New York.

Captain O’Neill and his crew wage a perpetual battle, not only with the constant danger from weather conditions in the days before reliable navigational aids, but with their own private problems … a marriage broken by long periods of separation, haunting fears of a previous crash, the flowering of a new romance.

This particular flight is no less fraught for the passengers. Amongst them, a crooked financier, an Italian nobleman and his beautiful wife whose passion for a mysterious sheikh endangers them all, and two Jewish refugees, a father and daughter, hounded across Europe by the Gestapo. Their epic journey traces hazards in the swamps of the Sud, intrigue in the palaces of Egypt and a career on the line on the eve of the Atlantic crossing. All this against a background of vanished luxury and splendour in the final days before World War II.

And even the safety of America is an illusion. On a quiet lake in New England an embittered veteran is readying his fighter for an assault on Imperial 109 and her cargo of gold bullion.