Airframe by Michael Crichton

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The plot of the story is focused around Casey Singleton who is a single mom and the quality assurance vice-president of Norton Aircraft, a company that deals with the manufacture of airplanes. Casey is called in to investigate the crash of one of Nortons wide-body aircraft, the Norton N-22 after it suffers a mysterious systems failure while it was on route to Denver. The crash leaves three people dead and scores of others seriously injured (Crichton, 1996).

Caseys background in the Incident Review Team (IRT) makes her the perfect candidate to perform the investigation into the Transpacific Airline Flight 545 crash. Together with other IRT team members, she must go through mountains of evidence and investigate a complex aircraft to find out what went wrong with the flight. She is under pressure from Nortons management to perform the investigation quickly as they are in the process of sealing a business deal with China, a deal that will help the company out of its financial situation.

The investigation is anything but smooth as Casey and her team is faced with a myriad of problems. The first problem they encounter is that the pilot of the Norton N-22 is in a coma. Before the crash, he gave conflicting accounts on what was happening during the crash and also the severity of injuries in the plane. Another setback is that the black box recordings of the plane are scrambled up, making it difficult to understand what happened before the plane went down. This is coupled with the fact that the Norton N-22 plane had an excellent safety record eliminating mechanical failure and the pilot was highly trained which ruled out pilot error as being the cause of the crash (Crichton, 1996). As the progress of the investigation, Casey has to deal with mounting pressure from the media to tell them what happened to the plane and also Nortons deal with China that could see many employees of the company losing their jobs.

Richman and Marders plan was to wait for an incident where the reputation of the N-22 would be put into a questionable situation. This plane crash provided them with the opportunity to negotiate another aircraft deal with Korea that was worth $16 billion. In return, they would get the rights to design the N-22s wing. Casey eventually destroys their plan by revealing to the media the true cause of the accident which was caused by human error. The captain had let his son fly the plane knowing well that he was not certified to fly an N-22. Some parts of the plane refused to respond due to poor maintenance and when the captains son tried to rectify the problem, the plane crashed (Crichton, 1996).

Character Analysis

The main character in this book is Casey Singleton as the story is revolved around her and her job. Her role is put under pressure by characters such as Bob Richman who is Caseys assistant in the Quality Assurance department of Norton Aircraft and John Marder, who is Nortons, Chief Operating Officer. Casey also faces pressure from the media to provide them with any leads on the investigations, the China deal, and the financial crisis in Norton. She is interviewed on several occasions by Mart Reardon who works as an investigative journalist with Newsline. Reardon works in collaboration with Jennifer Malone, a segment producer at Newsline, and Dich Shenk, the segment Organizer in the same media house to create sensationalist reports about Norton. Other characters in the novel are Harold Edgarton, the president of Norton, Barbara Ross the secretary of IRT, Doug Doherty who works in the Structure and Mechanical unit of Norton, Mike Lee, a representative of TransPacific Airlines, and Nguyen Van Trung who works in the Avionics department. Norma who is Caseys assistant who also plays a pivotal role in the plot as she helps Casey uncover the truth (Crichton, 1996).

Themes and Reference to Reality

Themes that were prominent in the novel were air safety procedures and the safety of airplanes and the publics perception of how safe an aircraft is, the consequences of sensationalist journalism where media houses go to great lengths to distort the truth from their readers to come up with a top-selling story and human error when it comes to plane crashes or accidents that involve any machinery. Airframe draws its reference from real plane accidents such as the American Airlines Flight 191, Aeroflot Flight 593, and China Eastern Flight 583. The facts about these particular plane crash such as human error and poor plane maintenance are accurately portrayed in Airframe.

This novel portrays how aircraft companies respond to air tragedies by carrying out investigations and analyzing the aircraft wreckages to find out the cause of the crash. The story accurately portrays media reaction and sensationalist journalism, especially if the aircraft manufacturer is one of the best in the world. This is a well-written piece of science fiction work that accurately relates to reality.

References

Crichton, M. (1996) Airframe. Techno-thriller, Science fiction. United States: Knopf.

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Airframe by Michael Crichton

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