Review: Enjoyed it, but a couple things could have been better
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 20, 2014
I am not a pilot, but as an engineer I have an interest in things that fail. Aircraft are among the most complex machines we use in everyday life, and whenever they fail there is usually quite an investigation to find the root cause. This book is a summary of numerous propeller driven plane crashes and the investigations behind them.=== The Good Stuff ===* There is a good amount of detail behind each crash, and Job seems to have done a reasonable job of understanding the technical information and relaying it to his readers.* Several of the stories were just beyond incredible, and make today's highly reliable aircraft seem that much more amazing. My favorite tale was circuit breakers that more or less relied on having electrical power to be reset. A plane ended up crashing, with loss of life, because the navigation and communication instruments of an aircraft failed when battery power ran out after the circuit breakers on the generator circuit tripped.=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===* Job tends to use vocabulary that, as a non-pilot, I am just not familiar with. Sure, you can google the stuff, but I hate breaking my concentration to look up what an octa of clouds is, or what "gust lock" is.* A few of the technical descriptions just scream for a diagram. One crash, caused by a pilot's misunderstanding of how the fuel system really worked, was attributed to how fuel was moved between tanks and how various sensors reported this. I read the paragraph multiple times, and am still not sure I understand what happened. A block diagram would have been so helpful.* But if there were not enough technical diagrams, Job insists on starting of many chapters with a map showing the start and stop points of a flight. Sometimes useful for obscure locations and where geography plays a part, but a waste of space when showing me the relation between NYC and Chicago=== Summary===I liked the book, and found it technical enough to hold my interest without becoming so detailed as to cause me to lose interest. Job's descriptions are usually well written, and the narrative moves along quite well. Each chapter is a few pages long, and covers a separate incident. I would have preferred fewer stories, but with more detail, as many of the tales started to sound a bit alike.