On a Wing and a Prayer: Interviews with Airline Disaster Survivors, by Malcolm MacPherson

[rachelmanija]

A collection of interviews with plane crash survivors (both crew and passengers), plus some excerpts from cockpit recorders. The interviews are excerpts from the ones the NTSB does as part of its investigations. There's no way I wasn't going to like this book... right?

Surprise, surprise. It's almost willfully disappointing.

How, you are probably wondering, could this go wrong? What possible choices could an editor make to create a boring oral history of plane crashes?

The main issue is a near-total lack of context. Each chapter is a set of extracts from interviews of survivors of a particular crash. There's an opening paragraph that says more-or-less what happened in the crash, but they're along the lines of "Flight 182 departing from Houston to Miami crashed while taking off. Three of the 102 passengers were killed." There's not enough details given in advance to understand what exactly happened during the crash, and there's no explanatory material other than that. He doesn't say what caused the crash - ever!

The excerpts are broken up into more-or-less chronological order, so you might get a bit of a flight attendant and a bit of a passenger saying what happened before the crash, then they come back later to give accounts of what happened during. There may be as many as ten or twelve different people appearing in a single chapter, with each of them getting 1 - 5 segments of an interview. But MacPherson doesn't name the passengers (sometimes, apparently at random, he doesn't name the crew either), but rather gives them random anonymous headings like "male, seat 23" or "female, age 45" or just "male passenger" so it's impossible to keep track of who is who. He's not even consistent within the same chapter/crash at identifying them by seat number, age, gender, or all of the above!

Seat number IDs are not helpful as there's no diagrams.

There are excerpts of cockpit transcripts, but with no context and editing applied apparently at random, they're almost impossible to follow. I strongly suspect that MacPherson didn't understand enough about the subject to know what was and wasn't relevant, so just threw in a couple pages with no idea how they related to the incident at hand.

It's difficult and at times impossible to tell what's actually going on in any given crash as there's no context, no care is given to selecting excerpts for clarity, and most of the passengers had no idea what was going on at the time.

There's no follow-up whatsoever. In multiple chapters, unnamed people say things like "And then I realized that I couldn't see my husband" and you never learn whether the husband survived or not.

I have read a lot of plane crash books and while this is not the worst, it takes the prize for biggest waste of potential.

Comments

[shipperslist]

I strongly suspect that MacPherson didn't understand enough about the subject to know what was and wasn't relevant, so just threw in a couple pages with no idea how they related to the incident at hand.

I can confidently say I understand absolutely nothing about aviation but even I know stuff like consistency and, you know, seating charts are pretty much essential. (Out of curiosity, were you able to keep quiet while reading or did you go, "Oh, come on!" at the author?)

[rachelmanija]

The absolute best tool for understanding plane crashes is a seating chart with each seat marked "killed," "serious injury," "minor injury," "no injury," and "unoccupied."

(Out of curiosity, were you able to keep quiet while reading or did you go, "Oh, come on!" at the author?)

The point where I caught myself muttering "Are you fucking kidding me?!" was when I hit a sentence where his practice of purposeless redaction made it come out basically like this:

I ran back and saw [flight attendant] trying to extract [other flight attendant] from the wreckage. She shouted at me to get help from [another flight attendant], but I didn't see her.

[conuly]

Oh, ffs that sentence.

[ratcreature]

Wtf? Why not give them fake names with a note saying that names have been changed for privacy, and call them Mary, Sue and Jane or such??

[rachelmanija]

It's an inexplicably terrible decision.

[silverflight8]

That sounds like a horribly edited/thought out book. What.

[crystalpyramid]

This seems like the kind of book that would be easy for an AI to pull together, if the records are public.

[rachelmanija]

The records are public but you need to go to NTSB headquarters in person to access them. Honestly I'd have preferred the unedited full dossiers.

[autopope]

It's not the full unedited dossiers, but you may find The Aviation Herald interesting? It's a website covering every reported civil aviation incident, accident, or disaster since it started (over 20 years ago). Comments, curated, mostly by commercial pilots. Publishes the public reports, NOTAMS, circumstantial stuff, YouTube videos (where available), photos (where there are no corpses in view), and a synopsis of the final report. Objective is to provide pilots with an as-it-unfolds run-down of whatever happened.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks!

[swan_tower]

An online friend of mine also runs Fear of Landing, which might be of interest.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks, that looks great! So does her memoir.

[minoanmiss]

that's just irresponsible. Feh.

[mildred_of_midgard]

It's like Code 1244!

[rachelmanija]

OMFG, you're right! Though honestly Code 1244 takes the cake as the single most poorly organized disaster book I've ever read.

[landofnowhere]

And the cover says that he has an earlier book he edited of cockpit transcripts? How did they ask him to write another book, or did he do better with the first one?

[rachelmanija]

Ohh, I didn't realize it was the same guy. That book was straight-up cockpit transcriptions, IIRC with slightly more context; it wasn't as incoherent as the transcriptions weren't broken up and they had speaker attributions, IIRC, but I did not keep it despite an interest in the subject matter.

[derien]

Sounds like an opportunity for you to write a book covering the same ground more interestingly. :)