Air Crashes and Miracle Landings: 60 Narratives (How, When ... and Most Importantly Why) Paperback – April 12, 2010

This is a very good summary of a selection of important air incidents. I am a fan of the "Air Disasters" series on the Smithsonian channel, and several of these summaries match up with the incidents dramatized in that series. Each of those episodes is an hour long, and sometimes the story seems stretched out to fill the hour. Here, the chapters are compact and generally contain most of the key information -- and where there is more information available, the author points you to web sites (including his own) where you can find more information / links. The incidents are grouped into chapters by type (e.g., "Loss of Power over Land," and "Loss of Power over Water").Why didn't I rate it 5 stars? Well, as other reviewers have noticed, there still are some annoying typos -- the author was poorly-served by his copy editor / proofreader. Also, I would have liked the chapters to have more of a "standard" feel -- for example, putting some information in the same place of each review (date, aircraft type, location, time-of-day, ...).All in all, this is a very good book, and I will be recommending it to my friends. I don't write many reviews on Amazon, so I am voting with my time in writing this, too.

I'm an airline pilot and picked this up for light reading during flights. Having just finished it, i find it is really quite good. Assuming the writer is not an aviation professional, i'm actually quite surprised and impressed after reading several other books of the sort written by actual pilots or aviation safety experts, to note the writer has got quite a good understanding of airline cockpit culture, operations, and indeed even the technical side of things. His extensive research in this area i expect would put most others less impassioned to sleep, but he writes well and in an engaging manner. Though some have complained in other reviews, I find that the personal opinions and conjecture he injects into each narrative to be what actually ENHANCES the reading experience. Case in point Pan Am/KLM jumbo at Tenerife. Read about it a hundred times, but he presents a very plausible new angle, with the KLM pilots' backgrounds fleshed out. It's not what you've heard. SQ006 at Taipei, he describes in detail the aftermath and conveys the feeling of helplessness of the pilots at the hands of the Taiwanese system and media trying to crucify them. As an outsider, given the available information, his grasp of the pertinent issues is both accurate and enlightening.I would recommend it, even for pilots who may have read most of the cases before. Many new points are brought up,with points of view that may surprise you.My copy had none of the so-called grammatical errors or spelling mistakes which caused the book to earn an unfortunate 1-star from a couple of reviewers.

Bear in mind the following: this is no Macarthur Job line of work. Much on the contrary. And that's the reason you have SIXTY accidents covered here. So, given the intention and scope of the book, each accident is covered very briefly, withotu detailed or elaborated graphics, time lines and such. It is more like a friendly chit-chat between the author and the reader.Each of the cases (some of them covering ony one page) gives a summary of the events. Not all of them are tragic, since the focus of the work is to enlighten, not to gain money from tragedies.A good book, although once again I feel the need to warn: this is no Macarthur Job work (as a note, the writer quotes Macarthur Job a lot in this book).

There is clearly an intelligent source of information and conjecture behind this book (KINDLE EDITION), but the thousands of mistakes, covering the entire range of elements of the written English language, make reading the e-book tedious and confusing. Even the graphics are either non-existent (when the writing refers to a diagram that never appears) or illegible with telltale signs of extreme JPEG compression. The overall poor quality of the work is completely unacceptable for a book for sale.I can only conclude that the true author(s) of this book is/are very new to the English language, or possibly the book was translated from another language through automation without any attempts to proofread or edit the final product. I'm new to e-books, but the few that I have read do not have the same, all-encompassing lack of writing skills. From cover to cover the book shouts garbled, incoherent language.If one tries hard to look past the astonishing number of gaffes, there are some morsels of intelligence that can make mining for them somewhat rewarding for a person such as myself, who is already familiar with most of the incidents mentioned. I have read every aviation forensics book that I have come across, and without that extensive prior knowledge, I imagine that the book would be mostly incomprehensible. That is sad because this book does offer some ideas that are not explored in other works.I don't know if the print version is any better than the e-book, but I will not risk throwing good money after bad to find out. IMO, "Aviation Disasters" by David Gero continues to be the best, most comprehensive and most logically laid-out work in this class of study. I own the first and second editions, and will most certainly continue to buy the later, up-to-date versions.This book might come close to Gero's seminal work if someone rewrote the book to rectify the astounding number and breadth of errors, and present the background intelligence in a more consistent format.

Excellent

good

My husband was pleased with the book

Not to be missed at the shelves of any Aviation Safety organization . A MUST READ for professional of this area .

Nice reference to the eventualities of air crashes. This book is straight to the point, no dramatisations. Recommend watching Air crash investigation episodes after reading the book.