Empire of the Clouds story of the R101 airship, which crashed on its maiden voyage in northern France on 5 October 1930. The song was written entirely by the band's lead vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, who initially intended it to be about "World War I fighter airplanes;" Dickinson abandoned the idea after using the same theme for the song "Death or Glory," also from "The Book of Souls". At the time of recording, Dickinson was reading "a big, sort of encyclopedic crash report" of the R101, entitled "To Ride the Storm", which gave him the idea for the song's eventual subject. Dickinson describes it as
R101 Vickers with the support of the British government, but when the General Election of 1923 brought Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour administration to power the new Air Minister, Lord Thomson, formulated the Imperial Airship Scheme in its place. This called for the building of two experimental airships: one, R101, to be designed and constructed under direction of the Air Ministry, and the other, R100, to be built by a Vickers subsidiary, the Airship Guarantee Company, under a fixed-price contract. This led to the nicknames the "Socialist Airship" and the "Capitalist Airship". In addition to the building of the two airships, the scheme