Customer Reviews

Air Disasters: The Truth Behind the Tragedies

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

As with the companion book on Shipwrecks (Eastlake), this is not the place to go for extensive factual information. Each disaster is described in a page at most, and no effort is made to explain the causes or after effects of the accidents. The book's value lies in its artistic layout. Every calamity is well illustrated, either with paintings or photos, and the chapters are organized by cause (weather, collision, etc.) Readers might look at this book as a supplement to others in their collection. Not a great read, but worth having on the shelf.

I must be a rubber necker to the highest degree because I always enjoy these type of books. It has the standard fair, nothing really new on the format. The author does give us a good amount of detail, which he is known for. I would always like more photos, but there is enough to tell the story. If you like this type of book then you will enjoy this one.

It's clear to me that the sole purpose of this book is give a brief general introduction to 50 significant air disasters. In doing so, the author aborded only the surface of the problems, without entering into detaisl. THe book, of course, can't be compared to MacArthur Job's books, that goes deeply into the accidents with diagrams, sketches, deep aviation knowledge, etc. Mind you, guys: they are books written with different purposes.

In regard to the previous review, I didn't see in the Tenerife accident any reference to any year other than 1977, the correct date. I would be interested, however, to know where the authors found their information on this accident, as the Canary Islands are a Spanish possession and the NTSB did not issue a report. I would be interested in finding an NTSB-type report on this accident, as this book did sensationalize it some (the Fairchild FH-227 crash in Chile was sensationalized excessively, taking more time to describe the death and injuries than it did to describe the technical points of the crash), and I'm needing something a bit more formal for Tenerife.