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 flight to India was out of the question. Airship operations under tropical conditions were made more difficult by the loss of lift in high air temperatures: the loss of lift in Karachi was estimated to be as much as 11 tons for an airship the size of R101. On 2 October the press were invited to Cardington to view the finished airship. However, weather conditions made it impossible to take it out of the shed until 12 October, when it was walked out by a ground-handling party of 400. The event attracted a huge number of spectators, with surrounding roads