Air Disasters: Black Box Dialogue Transcripts - Real Aviation Incident Recordings for Flight Safety Training & Investigation

Aircraft Disasters covers the major accidents in modern aviation history beginning with the R101 airship fire and ending with Boeing 747 disasters in 1985. I really appreciated the excellent balance maintained throughout the book between technical detail and readability. Each accident is expertly described with its unique features carefully brought out. The author takes pains to highlight all the relevent factors necessary to understand the reasons why a particular crash occured. An example would be the exhaustive water tank testing done at Farnborough in England on a DeHavilland Comet airframe to discover the cause (metal fatigue) of the Comet crashes in the early 1950's. Another example would be the detail description of the DC10 cargo door latching mechanism that failed and which resulted in the crash of a DC10 near Paris in 1974. I particularly appreciated the author's second by second recounting verbatim of aircraft-to-control tower communication - one really feels the situation in the cockpit in the vital seconds prior to impact. The only negative experience I had in reading this book is knowing it would end. I have read it twice and anticipate reading it again soon! I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in reading about prominent air disasters in a way that extends beyond a superficial description and yet is more readable than say, an Aviation Week and Space Technology accident report.