No Highway
It could be you're thinking of 'No Highway'. Apparently at the inquiry into the Comet crashes, one of the legal people quoted the book by Neville Shute, written some years previously, where he 'prophesied' metal fatigue causing aircraft accidents. Neville Shute Norway was a very far-seeing man; some of his other books prophesied events which have gone close to the way he wrote of them. But to talk of that is going off the thread!