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
The Way to the Stars did not regret her own marriage in spite of her husband's death. Hollis, who has formed a platonic relationship with Toddy, is killed while crash-landing a damaged returning bomber rather than bail out and risk it crashing into the village. During the war, Rattigan served in the Royal Air Force as a tail gunner, and used his wartime experiences to help inspire his earlier stage play, "Flare Path". In 1945, he was released from the service to help rewrite it with Anatole De Grunwald as a film screenplay of "The Way to the Stars". Although Michael Redgrave and John Mills