BRACE FOR IMPACT!

Eleven kilometres above us at a cruising speed of more than 800km/h, at least eight million passengers a day criss-cross the globe on more than 30 million flights a year.

Accidents, they say, will happen but one of the abiding impressions from this book is that air accidents are averted much more regularly than we’d care to think – almost every day on every plane, something goes wrong.

The author’s focus is on the accident investigation side of air disasters, the attempt to discover what went so badly wrong.

The slightly sensationalist title hides a more serious intent than mere prurience.

We are shown how air accidents are due to communications failures, an over-reliance on technology, in-built design defects or simple human error, and how the history of air accidents is littered with disasters, mishaps, near misses, controversy, cover-ups, corporate malfeasance and the loss of many lives.

It is, perhaps inevitably, the disappeared passenger planes that occupy the imagination most (there have been about 12 in all). Understandably, particular prominence is given to the most recent disappearance, in March 2014, of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-370, which vanished, seemingly without trace or explanation, somewhere between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing and which precipitated a search that played out so dramatically on our TV screens.

Negroni’s theory about what happened on MH-370 involves hypoxia, a condition caused by loss of pressure, which leads to oxygen deprivation and thence apparently to feeble-minded, imbecilic incompetence among pilots. Rapid decompression, just so you know, is a regular occurrence in the skies.

Negroni is an experienced, wellrespected US journalist who has spent most of her career following the airline industry; her knowledge and enthusiasm are evident throughout and she covers most of the major incidents of the past 75 years and interviews pilots and survivors.

However, despite being aimed at the general reading public, the book still contains a bit too much baffling technical information and the reader’s enjoyment is further marred by a writing style that is serviceable at best.

The list of air crashes is an appalling roll call of human tragedy but the uncomfortable truth that emerges is that advances in air safety have only been made possible through the ghastly business of analysing and identifying what went wrong.

If you are a nervous flyer, this book won’t do anything to reassure you.