Review: Disappointing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 9, 2012
As an electronics engineer with a special interest in reliability, I have always been fascinated by the investigations of aircraft disasters. The ability of investigators to piece together the details of a crash from the smallest of clues is just amazing, and represents one of the most difficult disciplines in engineering. Nicholas Faith attempts to chronicle several of these efforts over the past years, concentrating on large, commercial airline crashes.==The Good Points===* Faith writes well. The tales are lively, and keep moving. They capture the horror of the situation, but avoid sensationalizing the tragedy and personal suffering of the victims and their families. Faith attempts to consider all aspects of an investigation, including the personal, technical and operational problems. The book is "techy", but certainly not above the level of a high-school graduate with an interest in the subject.* Several of the chapters are well done. The discussion of the Air France Concorde crash in Paris was first rate, and included an alternate hypothesis to the now familiar "piece of metal from another jet" that was generally accepted. In this discussion, and one or two others, Faith hits a home run.* Faith tells the story of both the principle characters involved in the crash, and the work of the investigators. I really got a feel for the feeling of hopelessness of flying out to a crash site where you can't even see the plane, because it is mired in 40 feet of Everglades muck.==The Bad Points===* Reliability at this level deals in the parts per billion/failures per billion hours level of failure. In other words, this is a very exacting and precise science. Unfortunately Faith can seem to decide how technical he wants this book to be, and it varies from hand-waving to relatively rigorous technical arguments. The book would be much better if this level of technical detail was consistent.* Faith is prone to off-the-cuff remarks. I almost stopped reading after the first few pages, when the author informs me that the chances of a child born today being killed in a plane crash are less than his being elected President. Well, no, this is simply not true. A quick bit of thinking will tell you that a new President is born roughly every 4-8 years. The death rate of air travel, while comfortably low, is still considerably higher than one death of a child every 4 years. Since so much of the analysis presented is, at least indirectly, based on statistics, this was not a good start for the book.* But my biggest complaint is simply errors in facts presented. I don't claim to be an expert in aviation disasters, but I do know that Captain Chesley Sullenberger landed his Airbus in the Hudson River, not the EAST River as Faith indicates. I also know that "tornado alley" is not in the Rocky Mountains, but rather in the plains to the east. These were the most flagrant errors, but there were several others that I caught.The problem is how many more errors were there? If the editing/proofreading process did not catch these relatively obvious factual errors, what else lurks in the book? As a result, I sort of ended up reading the book with a constant doubt in my mind as to the accuracy. It sort of ruined the whole book.==Summary===* My overall impression was a book full of facts related from official reports and interviews...but with nagging doubts over how well the facts were understood and related by the author. If Faith can't correctly relate the name of the river where one of the most well-known crashes took place, what else is incorrect or missing? How am I supposed to believe that the author correctly understood and related a relatively complex analysis of rivet holes and metal fatigue in an airframe?The answer is that I can't. I ended up reading the book more as a work of "semi-fiction", not something that can be totally believed, but perhaps a hint as to incidents that happened and their root causes. This sort of defeats the whole purpose of the book.