Book Review – Michael Crichton’s “Airframe”
Today I finished reading Michael Crichton‘s novel, Airframe.
Overall, it was pretty good like most of Crichton’s other stories, but as an FAA licensed private pilot and general aviation enthusiast, I felt like the story was lacking better substance and a more evil plot.
I liked the initial part of the story. It begins with a foreign airliner cruising from Asia to the U.S. It’s near the end of the long flight and most of the passengers are still asleep and zoned out in their own little worlds. And then, out of nowhere, the aircraft experiences several severe pitch oscillations, creating tremendous positive and negative g-force effects on the flight crew and passengers, and the end result was the killing of a couple of people and scores of severe injuries. The aircraft declares an emergency and then continues the flight and lands in Los Angeles, CA.
From there the investigation begins as to why the aircraft experienced the unknown problems. The book follows along as a female investigator examines the evidence and pursues leads as to the possible causes for the incident. The investigator is under constant pressure from her boss and the local aircraft assembly worker union who threaten her if the company goes down because of the accident and potential transferring of their jobs overseas. To make matters worse, the news media also gets involved and hounds the investigator to the very end.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I won’t mention it here. I’ll just say that I correctly guessed the reasoning behind the aircraft’s behavior, but I don’t like the way that the author handled it. After reading the setup for the accident I was expecting a darker and much more sinister reasoning behind the incident rather than the rather simple explanation given in the book. I also don’t agree with the fact that one of the crew members was as stupid and inexperienced as the author claimed.
Overall, this was still a fairly good story and had plenty of technical information relating to the aircraft itself and the assembly process. I would imagine that many people without at least a general understanding of aviation would have a harder time picturing what Crichton is talking about in times and how aircraft really behave once they’re airborne.
This story is an investigative one and not nearly as action packed as other novels such as Timeline, Jurassic Park or even State of Fear. Was it bad? Certainly not. This book was well written and if you have an interest in general aviation or just enjoy a good investigative, suspenseful story, then you’ll be turning the pages like crazy while reading along and piecing together the clues.
Add Airframe to the collection of novels that every Michael Crichton fan needs to enjoy.