Air Disasters: The Truth Behind the Tragedies [Hardcover]

Mike Sharpe (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Brown Partworks (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1840440260
• ISBN-13: 978-1840440263
• Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 9.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,138,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Air Disasters, July 2, 2000

By 

Travis Filing - See all my reviews

This review is from: Air Disasters: The Truth Behind the Tragedies (Hardcover)

Definately not the best aviation disaster book I have read. The authors seem to lack alot of aeronautical knowledge and for some reason they do not refrence all of the places they received information.

It is not the worst book I have ever read, However, I would recommend "The Black Box" by Malcom MacPherson. For a couple more bucks you will get 10 times the book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars POINTLESS BOOK, June 20, 2001

By 

Gergellor (Supimpalāndia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Air Disasters: The Truth Behind the Tragedies (Hardcover)

Relating briefly 50 air crashes is not the best way to write a book about this relevant subject. Some of the accidentes described contains only ten or so lines in total !!!. Anyway, it gives a good general introduction to the naive person in this fascinating, dramatic and morbid subject. If you wanna really know about air crashes, then stick to MacArthur Job's series ( three volumes ) AIR DISASTER.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lack of knowledge of aviation, May 17, 2000

By 

Simon Hradecky - See all my reviews

This review is from: Air Disasters: The Truth Behind the Tragedies (Hardcover)

I have overflown this book right after I received it - and am badly disappointed.

My conclusion: stay away from it. It's not worth it, despite the low price of just about US$ 7,--. In no way it can compete with other publications like Stanley Stewart's "Air Disasters" or the 3 volumes of Macarthur Job's "Air Disaster", or "Black Box" Series. Not only that the narration is very short and poor - and does nothing to highlight backgrounds of disasters and why they came together - it is also full of glaring errors and wrong depictions of causes of accidents, and therefore remains in contradiction with official accident reports. The lack of knowledge about aviation procedures is also apparent.

The generic idea would have been good - accidents categorized for "acts of aggression", "human errors", "collision", "Weather" and "mechanical failure" could have given another view of things. Going back into 1920 and summarizing accidents of both airplanes and Zeppelins also is an interesting approach. Around 50 accidents, many well known accidents - e.g. Zeppelin Hindenburgh at Lakehurst, DC-10 at Sioux City, Shootdown of KAL007 and Iranian Airbus, MidAir collision over Delhi (1996), Tenerife, Lauda 767 reverser, the DC-10 disasters of Paris and Chicago, the Comet crashes, ELAL at Amsterdam and many more) as well as a couple of accidents, that I had no documentation for before, are covered. 50 quite interesting accidents, that would have certainly

provided valuable background and information to fill more than 95 pages. I have the suspect, that it was more the intention of the author to use many spectacular photographs of crashed aircraft (120 photos according to a statement on the backcover) and satisfy the "sensationalism" than anything else.

I take out three accident reports to show the reasons for my judgement of this book: The Lauda Air B767 reverser accident, Air New Zealands Tragedy at Mount Erebus and the Tenerife Jumbo collision.

Lauda Air is apparently located in Australia, and Niki Lauda won three titles in Formula one racing for the fifth continent. Poor Austria! I guess, geography should be alright in aviation, where navigation is a crucial portion of safe operations of airplanes. But it comes worse. Since when for example are reversers used "obviously to reverse from a loading ramp"? While only a few types with high mounted tail engines ever tried that (and suffered quite a few shocking "foreign object damage" to their engines, when objects around the gates were sucked into the engines), it has been unheard of for a B767 with low mounted engines under the wings. And that's still not the worst - the book gives the incorrect impression, that _BOTH_ reversers deployed in flight.

Air New Zealands tragedy at Erebus does not at all take into account, what has been established at court, but provides only the preliminary findings of the aviation authorities, that were overruled by court. For example, there is no mention of the white out effect. There is little mention of the reprogramming of INS coordinates unknown to the crew and the resulting changed flight path, that only led into Mount Erebus. After all, the book comes to the conclusion, that human errors on both airline and crew have led to the disaster - neglecting the final findings which exonerated the crew entirely and placed all blame on the airline.

The Book is not able to find the exact date of the collision of the KLM and PanAm Jumbos at Tenerife. Covering three accidents at and around Tenerife from 1972 to 1980 (one in 1972, 1977 and 1980) it refers to the collision in 1975 in the two other Tenerife accidents and only lists the correct date in the title of "Tenerife, Canary Islands, Mach 27, 1977").

Sorry for that blunt, extremely negative review of this book (that I already wrote in disgust after just speedreading over the book for about 30 minutes), that only serves to me to show, what excellent quality other publications have been and how lucky I am to have seen these before.