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Swissair Down: Investigating the Crash of Flight 111

by Don Ledger

By now, most people have absorbed the popular wisdom that when a butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world, such minuscule turbulence can initiate a chain of unforeseen effects, resulting in a local windstorm. The more intricate a system, the more vulnerable it is to the tiniest disturbances. Most people try and forget such theories when they purchase an airline ticket – there’s a special kind of anxiety that comes with contemplating all that heavy-metal circuitry out on the tarmac.

But journalist Don Ledger, also a pilot, understands how a log-jam of almost infinitesimal factors – human actions, cost-cutting measures, and wire-thin mechanical deficiencies – can cause colossal systems failures. Ledger’s book chronicles the crash of Swissair Flight 111 off Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, in September of 1998, and it covers every aspect of the disaster, from the design aspects of the jet to the search and recovery procedures. However, Ledger has no definitive explanation for the crash, and can only speculate on a combination of possible factors: faulty wiring, inadequate back-up orientation instruments, and, just possibly, a by-the-book inflexibility in the cockpit.

Swissair Down is a thorough, decent, and authoritative book, but the technically minded Ledger is not a particularly gripping writer – his prose has a sort of educational-video tone throughout. Still, Ledger’s obvious love of aviation and his sorrow at the “pack ’em and stack ’em” grubbiness of the major airlines gives the book a doleful power.

But it doesn’t go far enough, fiercely enough. When Ledger recommends that air travellers “look for the airline company that will fix any problem and herald the improvement so that others might be warned,” he doesn’t tell us how, where, or even if such information is available. Nor does he examine the culture of air travel, in which the airlines maintain a cabalistic, say-nothing attitude to questions about safety. And I wonder how Ledger would respond to the pilot I saw interviewed on the beach of Peggy’s Cove, a week after the crash, as items of clothing bobbed on the shoreline behind, who noted that it’s cheaper for airlines to pay off the families of a few hundred names on a list than to fix whole fleets of aging time bombs.

 

Reviewer: Adair Brouwer

Publisher: Nimbus Publishing

DETAILS

Price: $16.95

Page Count: 176 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-55109-301-4

Released: May

Issue Date: 2000-5

Categories: History

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