The Flight 981 Disaster

Author: Samme Chittum
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 1588346048
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
On June 12, 1972, a powerful explosion rocked American Airlines Flight 96 a mere five minutes after its takeoff from Detroit. The explosion ripped a gaping hole in the bottom of the aircraft and jammed the hydraulic controls. Miraculously, despite the damage and ensuing chaos, the pilots were able to land the plane safely. Less than two years later, on March 3, 1974, a sudden, forceful blowout tore through Turk Hava Yollari (THY) Flight 981 from Paris to London. THY Flight 981 was not as lucky as Flight 96; it crashed in a forest in France, and none of the 346 people onboard survived. What caused the mysterious explosions? How were they linked? Could they have been prevented? The Flight 981 Disaster addresses these questions and many more, offering a fascinating insiders' look at two dramatic aviation disasters.

The Last Nine Minutes

Author: Moira Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aircraft accidents
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
On March 3, 1973, Flight 981, a DC-10 aircraft owned and flown by Turkish Airlines and carrying 334 passengers and a crew of 12, took off from Orly airport in Paris. Nine minutes later, it crashed into the Ermenonville Forest, killing all 346 aboard. It was the first crash of a fully loaded "wide-body" jet and the largest air disaster in aviation history at that time.

Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival

Author: Laurence Gonzales
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244148
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
"A richly detailed story that is equal parts heartbreaking, inspiring…and full of fascinating science…masterful." —San Francisco Chronicle 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. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, crew, and airport and rescue personnel, Laurence Gonzales, a commercial pilot himself, captures, minute by minute, the harrowing journey of pilots flying a plane with no controls and flight attendants keeping their calm in the face of certain death. He plumbs the hearts and minds of passengers as they pray, bargain with God, plot their strategies for survival, and sacrifice themselves to save others. Ultimately he takes us, step by step, through the gripping scientific detective work in super-secret labs to dive into the heart of a flaw smaller than a grain of rice that shows what brought the aircraft down. An unforgettable drama of the triumph of heroism over tragedy and human ingenuity over technological breakdown, Flight 232 is a masterpiece in the tradition of the greatest aviation stories ever told.

Destination Disaster

Author: Paul Eddy
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description

Southern Storm

Author: Samme Chittum
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1588345599
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The gripping true tale of a devastating plane crash, the investigation into its causes, and the race to prevent similar disasters in the future. On the afternoon of April 4, 1977, Georgia housewife Sadie Burkhalter Hurst looked out her front door to see a frantic stranger running toward her, his clothes ablaze, and behind him the mangled fuselage of a passenger plane that had just crashed in her yard. The plane, a Southern Airways DC-9-31, had been carrying eighty-one passengers and four crew members en route to Atlanta when it entered a massive thunderstorm cell that turned into a dangerous cocktail of rain, hail, and lightning. Forced down onto a highway, the plane cut a swath of devastation through the small town of New Hope, breaking apart and killing bystanders on the ground before coming to rest in Hurst's front yard. Ultimately, only twenty-two people would survive the crash of Flight 242, and urgent questions immediately arose. What caused the pilots to fly into the storm instead of away from it? Could the crash have been prevented? Southern Storm addresses these issues and many more, offering a fascinating insider's look at this dramatic disaster and the systemic overhauls that followed it.

The Mammoth Book of Air Disasters and Near Misses

Author: Paul Simpson
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1780338295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 603

Book Description
An incredible 30,000 flights – at least – arrive safely at their destinations every day. But a handful don’t, while some come terrifyingly close to crashing. When even the smallest thing does go wrong at 35,000 feet, the result is nearly always a fast-unfolding tragedy. This extensive collection of compelling real-life accounts of air disasters and near-disasters provides a sobering, alternative history of the just over 105 years that passengers have been travelling by air, from the very earliest fatality to recent calamities. But there are incredible stories of heroism against the odds, too, such as that of Captain Chesley Sullenberger who successfully landed his aircraft with both engines gone on the Hudson River in New York, saving the lives of everyone aboard, and of the American Airlines crew who prevented terrorist Richard Reid from exploding a bomb hidden in his shoe three months after 9/11. The book also details the often ingenious, always painstaking work done by air-accident investigators, while a glossary helps to clarify the occasional, inevitable bits of jargon.

Collision on Tenerife

Author: Jon Ziomek
Publisher: Post Hill Press
ISBN: 1682617742
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
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 this riveting account, written from the perspective of the passengers in the cabin as well as the crew members in the cockpits, Jon Ziomek explains how this largely forgotten accident took place—and what has happened since to reduce the possibility of another such catastrophe.

Crash of TWA Flight 260

Author: Charles M. Williams
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826348084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
This moment-by-moment account of a major airplane crash on a beautiful and treacherous mountainside puts the reader at the pilot's side, describing the flight, its catastrophic ending, and the aftermath. At 7:05 a.m. on February 19, 1955, TWA Flight 260 took off from the Albuquerque airport for a short flight to Santa Fe. To avoid flying over the Sandia Mountains, the plane's approved air route was a dogleg running north-northwest from Albuquerque, then east-northeast into Santa Fe. But at 7:08 a.m. Flight 260 was headed directly toward Sandia Ridge, almost entirely obscured by storm clouds. A local resident who saw Flight 260 overhead observed that if the plane was eastbound, it was too low; if it was northbound, it was off course. At 7:12 a.m. the plane's terrain-warning bell sounded its alarm. Both pilots saw the sheer west face of the Sandias just beyond the right wingtip––an appalling shock considering they should have been ten miles further west. Reacting instantly, they rolled the plane steeply to the left, pulled its nose up, and started to level the wings. It was their final act. Hidden by the storm, another cliffside lay directly ahead. When they struck it, they were still in a left bank, nose high.

Flight 232

Author: Laurence Gonzales
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393240023
Category : Aircraft accident victims
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Twenty-five years after the catastrophe, a dramatic and extraordinarily rare 360-degree view of the crash of a fully loaded jumbo jet.

Emergency

Author: Neil Strauss
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060898771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Book Description
Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Domestic crackdowns. Economic collapse. Riots. Wars. Disease. Starvation. What can you do when it all hits the fan? You can learn to be self-sufficient and survive without the system. **I've started to look at the world through apocalypse eyes.** So begins Neil Strauss's harrowing new book: his first full-length worksince the international bestseller The Game, and one of the most original-and provocative-narratives of the year. After the last few years of violence and terror, of ethnic and religious hatred, of tsunamis and hurricanes–and now of world financial meltdown–Strauss, like most of his generation, came to the sobering realization that, even in America, anything can happen. But rather than watch helplessly, he decided to do something about it. And so he spent three years traveling through a country that's lost its sense of safety, equipping himself with the tools necessary to save himself and his loved ones from an uncertain future. With the same quick wit and eye for cultural trends that marked The Game, The Dirt, and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Emergency traces Neil's white-knuckled journey through today's heart of darkness, as he sets out to move his life offshore, test his skills in the wild, and remake himself as a gun-toting, plane-flying, government-defying survivor. It's a tale of paranoid fantasies and crippling doubts, of shady lawyers and dangerous cult leaders, of billionaire gun nuts and survivalist superheroes, of weirdos, heroes, and ordinary citizens going off the grid. It's one man's story of a dangerous world–and how to stay alive in it. Before the next disaster strikes, you're going to want to read this book. And you'll want to do everything it suggests. Because tomorrow doesn't come with a guarantee...