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BOOKS & MOVIES
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Hardcover
Published in 1996
by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
351 pages.
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Paperback
Published in 1997
by Ballantine Books
431 pages.
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Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin virtually destroyed. But the pilot manages to land the plane. . . .
At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner bound from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation.
AIRFRAME is nonstop reading: the extraordinary mixture of super suspense and authentic information on a subject of compelling interest that has been a Crichton landmark since The Andromeda Strain.
Features
Q & A with Michael Crichton: Airframe
The Charlie Rose Show: Airframe Interview - December 26, 1996
Note From Michael
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.
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© 1997-2012 Constant C Productions. All rights reserved.
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