A few of the incidents talked about here are written up really well - the ditching of Pan Am Flight 6 in the ocean with no fatalities and the August 1957 flight where a military transport flew 1000 miles on 2 engines, both of which were Boeing propeller failures - but those are all because of the perspective of the survivors allowing the causes to be understood completely. Unfortunately all of these incidents were on planes without a CVR and most had no FDR so we don't know what the crew were thinking and for many our knowledge of the cause is still a best guess.

I guess I was aware of the FDR/CVR issue but I was assuming still there would be an implicit narrative charting safety improvements that would lead into the next book. Instead about a 1/3 of the incidents occurred on turboprops and/or happened in the jet era. Which is fine but means there's not really that narrative. The inconclusiveness of some incidents is frustrating - not just in cause, but also how it seems nothing was learnt from them - and even though that's obviously just the facts it does make it frustrating reading sometimes. Hard to know if some of these were the best incidents to pick.

He also has a very clinical style and when the causes are known he dives into technical detail. Which is completely fine but also sometimes it misses context. For example, on the Stockport air disaster he dives into a multi page explication of the issues with fuel cross feed valves on that type of plane. But I came away none the wiser on why. Like although the issue was fuel starvation to 1 or 2 engines I couldn't work out why this wasn't obvious on the plans and they didn't try using the cross feed valves properly, when the issue was just that fuel ended up distributed weirdly. He also described a very complex process of how exactly the fuel tanks in use were selected which leads to the issue but didn't say why. I didn't really get any insight into how the crash happened and was left not understanding this obscure but clearly important part of flying propeller planes.

Overall it's ok but only for people very interested in the area. ( )