Ah yeah! I have mentioned before that the topic of 'Aircraft' warms my heart, lungs, kidneys etc. like nothing else... So, found "Airframe" on sale at some local discount shop... I forget where... but well yea, saw it and pounced on it! :D ... Also, read it like there was no tomorrow. It IS a compulsive page-turner.... and I often caught myself second-guessing what might happen next and ran ahead 2-3 pages just to quench my curiosity! After all 'Jurassic Park' and 'Lost World' did exactly that as movies (also authored by Michael Crichton)... It is definitely well recommended - you can finish it in 2 days flat! - seriously.
So well, you have a TransPacific flight going from Hong Kong to California and it undergoes a curious accident which is reported as turbulence by the pilot, killing 4 and injuring about 58 odd people (which a turbulence never does really). So it turns out, nobody understand what happened on the flight, and the blame lands on the manufacturers of the aircraft, a company called Norton.
Norton have an impending bulk order to China and hence have to race against time, to investigate and find the actual cause of the accident, lest their deal fails - resulting in immense damage to their brand name and subsequent closure of the company itself. So their Quality Assurance personnel, a lady called Katherine is assigned the task of solving the issue .... the story takes you with her rationale and intensive sleuthing (not only about the components that form the Aircraft - i.e. the Airframe itself) but also against her own co-workers and bosses and the story spins an intensive spell of skulduggery and mismanagement - even though the people on the floor are dedicated specialists who have immense knowledge of how much strain an aircraft can and will take! They build Airframes to take strain in multiple of more than 12 times or so what an aircraft claims on paper!!
Norton have an impending bulk order to China and hence have to race against time, to investigate and find the actual cause of the accident, lest their deal fails - resulting in immense damage to their brand name and subsequent closure of the company itself. So their Quality Assurance personnel, a lady called Katherine is assigned the task of solving the issue .... the story takes you with her rationale and intensive sleuthing (not only about the components that form the Aircraft - i.e. the Airframe itself) but also against her own co-workers and bosses and the story spins an intensive spell of skulduggery and mismanagement - even though the people on the floor are dedicated specialists who have immense knowledge of how much strain an aircraft can and will take! They build Airframes to take strain in multiple of more than 12 times or so what an aircraft claims on paper!!
It takes you into how union-workers bully management, and also (my favourite parts include...) on how Katherine handles Media 'Superstar' Hard-Talkers - who do not know anything about any technical information, nor do they care a damn about it. Sensational sells and that's all they really care about. A normal person, I can imagine, would undergo a nervous break-down under such immense pressure - and reading the novel makes you feel really good about the lead character; her practical mind really does handle all the shit really well!
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