Het eerste boek van Michael Crichton om eens door te nemen is Airframe. Het onderwerp is actueel nu weer gedoe is rondom Boeing.
Boeing whistleblower: ‘They are putting out defective airplanes’ Chris Isidore Gregory Wallace By Chris Isidore and Gregory Wallace, CNN .... Updated 6:23 PM EDT, Wed April 17, 2024 (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/17/business/boeing-whistleblower-safety-hearing/index.html)
How bad is Boeing's 2024 so far? Here's a timeline... In the first week of 2024, a Boeing 737 Max 9 passenger jet lost a rear door plug in midflight, terrifying people on board. The large door plug plummeted into the backyard of a high school science teacher in Portland, Ore. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the grounding of similarly configured Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft for weeks. "This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again," the FAA said at the time. The news hasn't gotten much better for Boeing, whose reputation was already tarnished by deadly crashes of its 737 Max 8 jets in 2018 and 2019, and a host of problems with its 787 Dreamliner a decade ago. (https://www.npr.org/2024/03/20/1239132703/boeing-timeline-737-max-9-controversy-door-plug)
Boeing Whistleblower John Barnett Found Dead Amid Depositions Against Plane Company... ohn Barnett was supposed to answer questions on Saturday as part of a deposition he’d been giving earlier last week related to a legal dispute with his former employer Boeing—which has been dogged by safety concerns, some of which he had raised. But he didn’t show up. When his legal team called him repeatedly to no avail, they eventually asked the hotel he was staying at to check in on him. That’s when Barnett was found dead in his truck in the parking lot. The Charleston County Coroner’s Office told TIME that Barnett died from “what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” and that the Charleston Police Department is continuing to investigate the death. Barnett’s lawyer Brian Knowles described the discovery as “tragic” to legal newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter, which first reported on Barnett’s death. “John had been back and forth for quite some time getting prepared,” said Knowles, who told Corporate Crime Reporter that he was set to cross-examine Barnett on Saturday for what would have been “day three of his deposition here in Charleston on his AIR21 case,” referring to the shorthand for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Whistleblower Protection Program. Barnett, who was based in Louisiana, was in South Carolina to offer evidence for legal proceedings linked to a defamation lawsuit against Boeing, which he claimed deliberately hurt his career and reputation because of allegations he’d made of grave safety breaches on the aircraft company’s production line. “John was in the midst of a deposition in his whistleblower retaliation case, which finally was nearing the end,” Knowles and his co-counsel Robert Turkewitz said in a statement to TIME. “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on. We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life. No one can believe it.” (https://time.com/6900123/boeing-whistleblower-john-barnett-found-dead-deposition-safety/)
Het boek gaat over een incident met een vliegtuig, dat onderzocht wordt.
Airframe is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, his eleventh under his own name and twenty-first overall, first published in 1996, in hardcover, by Knopf, just months after the crash of Tarom Flight 371. As a paperback, Airframe was released in 1997 by Ballantine Books. The plot follows Casey Singleton, a quality assurance vice president at the fictional aerospace manufacturer Norton Aircraft, as she investigates an in-flight accident aboard a Norton-manufactured airliner that leaves three passengers dead and 56 injured. ... Airframe remains one of Crichton's few novels not adapted to film. Crichton stated this was due to the great expense needed to make such a film. The novel's dense technical details for the accident investigation may also have hindered cinematic adaptations.[citation needed]... In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Crichton said that he drew upon the National Transportation Safety Board's aircraft accident report archives during his writing process, calling them "an unbelievable trove."[3] As a result, the N-22 accident described in the novel resembles two real-life cases: The violent oscillations, the issue with the flap/slat handle becoming dislodged, and the importance of pilot training in order to respond properly to the characteristics of a specific aircraft type are closely modeled on the 1993 accident aboard China Eastern Airlines Flight 583.[4] A pilot allowing his son to sit at the controls was also the cause of the 1994 Aeroflot Flight 593 crash.[5] As in the novel, the son inadvertently disabled their aircraft's autopilot, and the accident could have been averted by re-engaging it. However, while the son in Airframe is a pilot, the son in this case was only 16 years old. Also unlike the novel, the Aeroflot crew did not manage to recover from their overcorrection and crashed, killing all 75 passengers and crew. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airframe_(novel))
An aircraft industry insider told Michael Crichton about a near-crash mid-air event that was never reported in the media. Within the industry, however, questions arose about whether the incident was caused by design flaws in the aircraft itself. Airframe recounts a fictional version of the incident, how the company carefully investigated it, and how the media covered the entire episode. (https://www.michaelcrichton.com/works/airframe/)
I had wanted to write a story about manufacturing airplanes for many years, because it’s such a fascinating area: nothing human beings have ever manufactured is as complicated as a commercial jet aircraft. And nothing is built to such demanding specifications. But I could never come up with a story. Finally, someone in the aircraft industry brought a real incident to my attention, and I started to write. So Airframe is based on a true story-actually, several true stories. There are, of course, a number of famous episodes of deadly turbulence, as well as several instances in which pilots have allowed other people to fly the plane. I used the National Transport Safety Board reports on these real incidents as the basis of the story. (The NTSB reports are almost novels in themselves, with interviews, pictures, details, the whole works.) After months of research, I got pretty casual about the whole thing. One day I was flying across country with my research spread out on my lap-NTSB photos of the interior of an aircraft that had been badly smashed-up from turbulence. People would walk by, see the pictures and say, “What are you doing?” Finally a flight attendant asked me to put the pictures away. I was disturbing the other passengers. I don’t know why. Because the real discovery I made in my research is that commercial air travel is incredibly safe. Each year, thousands more people die choking to death from food than die on airplanes. And nobody is afraid to sit down at the table to eat. (https://www.michaelcrichton.com/works/airframe/)
Het boek gaat over technische thema's zoals AR (toen nog VR genoemd), media en de juridische wereld. Helaas herken ik er geen milieu-of natuuronderwerpen in. Mocht iemand iets weten dan hoor ik het graag.
