Aviation Disasters

Air travel is one of the safest modes of transportation, but when an aircraft crashes, the consequence is devastating. Why did they happen? Were they caused by bad weather, mechanical failure, or human errors? In this book, the author introduces the 10 deadliest plane crashes in aviation history. He goes through the key events that brought down the doomed commercial jets, and he discusses how we used the painful lessons to improve aviation safety.

As hundreds of rescue workers waited on the ground, United Airlines Flight 232 wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs northwest of Sioux City. The plane slammed onto the runway and burst into a vast fireball. The rescuers didn't move at first: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then people began emerging from the summer corn that lined the runways. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived. No one has ever attempted the complete reconstruction of a crash of this magnitude.

The world's worst air disaster happened more than 40 years ago on a remote Atlantic Ocean island, when two fully loaded 747 passenger jets collided after a horrendous series of human errors. One of the jets, KLM Flight 4805, was traveling more than 150 miles an hour and was within seconds of lifting off when it crashed into Pan Am Flight 1736 taxiing in its path. The loss of lives was staggering - 583 dead. The crash happened after a lengthy series of major and minor human errors. In the intervening years, has aviation advanced to the point that such a disaster can't happen again?

In The Crash Detectives, veteran aviation journalist and air safety investigator Christine Negroni takes us inside crash investigations from the early days of the jet age to the present, including the search for answers about what happened to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. As Negroni dissects what happened and why, she explores their common themes and, most important, what has been learned from them to make planes safer.

Final Destination: Disaster informs the public, for the very first time, of what actually precipitated the controversial sale of Eastern Airlines - at one time the second largest airline in the free world - to Frank Lorenzo's Texas Air Corporation, which led to its certain demise. This unbelievable story is written by an 18-year veteran Eastern pilot who was intimately involved in many aspects of the tumultuous events that culminated in the sale.

The most tragic accident in aviation history is more than a story of the loss of 583 lives. As gripping as the event is here in its telling, learning why the accident happened, much of it from the mouths of some of the crew who perished, is itself a story worth experiencing. The disaster did have an upside, for it has directly led to today's enviable commercial aviation safety record.

The Korean airliner took off from Alaska innocently enough, but a series of human errors caused it to veer into Russian airspace. Russian military intelligence trailed the plane for hours before shooting it down. The Last Flight of 007 is part of the Disaster non-fiction series that will engage listeners of all ages, including English Language Learners. These moments in history recall the death and destruction caused by both natural and manmade disasters around the world.

After a plane is forced to make an emergency landing in a remote area, the surviving crew and passengers must wait until a rescue team arrives. But they soon discover they are not alone in the wilderness, and the rescue team is not showing up anytime soon.

Bryce had Alec put away for all the right reasons. But now that Alec has gotten out of jail, he wants revenge, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. After extracting his travel information from a mutual friend, he boards a plane with Bryce. But when an EMP takes place in Alaska, the plane is forced to crash-land. Now that Bryce is stranded in the same wilderness as his stalker, he manages to stay a step ahead of him initially. But after facing the hazards of the cold, wintry wilderness, he soon finds himself losing the advantage.