Airframe

An eye opener into issues of safety and commercial aircraft manufacturing and competition mingled with boardroom in-fighting on the one hand, and the impact and modus operandi of (cable TV) journalism on the other. Norton is the manufacturer of aircrafts, and the chief operating officer (Marder) does not like the way he was passed over when the new president was picked, despite being married to the family of the founder. So he is secretly plotting to overthrow the president, using an accident involving one of their aircrafts as a ploy. While investigation is on to determine what caused the accident, the producer of Newsline, a weekly TV show, sees something worth selling to the public—the scary tale of a defective aircraft. Marder is very pleased with Newsline’s interest and does his best to both undermine discovery of the root cause of the accident and also leak confidential information to them.

But then Marder didn’t reckon with the dogged determination of our heroine, Casey Singleton, whose job put her in charge of QA/IRT (quality assurance and incidence review team) at the company. She succeeds in getting to the root causes of the accident after a tense fast-paced investigation: The captain of the aircraft had allowed his son to take his seat while he went for a coffee. And a bad part had given a wrong warning which the inexperienced son was unable to correctly handle, leading to the accident.

When Newsline could no longer air the story they had in mind, seeing Norton’s wasn’t actually an unsafe plane after all, the COO’s attempted coup had to flop in the end.

June 1, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel first published in 1996 by Century Books, this Arrow Books edition being first published in 1997, ISBN 0-09-955631-6.