Nevil Shute was an engineer and he wrote some well respected novels like the nuclear war story On the Beach (made into a movie twice), A Town like Alice (made into a film and TV series), and No Highway (sometimes called No Highway in the Sky after the title of the film based on it), which actually deals with aircraft engineering and the problems involved in designing early jet airliners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute