Readers won’t be surprised to learn that Michael Cricton’s thriller Airframe is about aeroplanes, pilots, engineers and the
aircraft industry as a whole. It is in fact set around the fictitious Norton N22 wide body passenger airliner. This new long haul jet is the great white hope of the struggling Norton Aircraft Company, and with the possibility of several major international orders on the way, the pencil pushers and number crunchers at Norton aren’t exactly delighted when one of the planes goes out of control in the sky leaving three passengers dead, fifty six injured and an FAA investigation on the way.
Naturally, the company have to submit the airframe and the entire components of the plane to rigorous tests to establish the probable cause of the erratic behaviour of their protégé in the sky. To blame the incident on pilot error would be most convenient as this would shift the focus from a suspect design fault to the human elements of failure.
When you have numerous witnesses with conflicting versions of what happened and one of the industry’s top and most experienced pilots captaining the plane at the time of the incident, then something doesn’t quite add up.
When attractive investigator Casey Singleton is put in charge of the point investigation team, things start happening around the hangars. While she and her team piece together vital clues as to what caused the aircraft to go out of control, more and more sinister events begin to take place.
Readers won’t expect anything less that the best from the author of Disclosure and Jurassic Park, but Airframe is just a little bit different. Plenty of high tech stuff to keep the technocrats happy but the story itself also has a few good twists and turns. A sophisticated and stylish thriller from beginning to end.