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rachelmanija Sep. 4th, 2023 10:15 am)
rachelmanija Sep. 4th, 2023 10:15 am)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.
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.
