Flight Failure chronicles maintenance-related accidents caused by individual, corporate or governmental negligence. It brings the industry's current state of affairs into sharp focus. Published by Prometheus Books in 2020, the book examines how failures of the smallest of parts have brought down airliners, explaining esoteric mechanical issues for readers having little technical background. Regardless of the airline or type of airplane, there exists a universal threat to flight safety that affects every passenger.
Vividly describing the terror of accidents and close calls, the book unravels details of subsequent investigations to determine causes. It points to the factors that have led up to an alarming scenario—aircraft design flaws, continued reduction of licensed mechanics, shutting down of maintenance bases in the United States, and the outsourcing of work to lowballing contractors. For employees on an airline's payroll, an ever-present threat to their jobs does nothing to cultivate corporate loyalty. The disturbing trend endangers every passenger who boards an airliner.
Revealed in Seventeen Days and Seventeen Miles Apart, an airliner crash resulted from a missing cotter pin someone had forgotten to install. The oversight killed all 78 people aboard TWA Flight 529. There were no lawsuits, no payments to next of kin, no firing of unionized but incompetent mechanics, and no acknowledgment that its airline had committed a crime. Trans World Airlines was owned and controlled by industrialist Howard Hughes. The Constellation that crashed on September 1, 1961 had been designed and built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
The loss of Flight 529 was reported to be the worst accident of a single airliner in the nation's history. It's a textbook example of how airlines and aircraft manufacturers can decide the limits of what to do after a crash rather than satisfy government requirements.
Seventeen days after the TWA crash, Flight 706, a Northwest Airlines Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashed after takeoff from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. All 37 people aboard died. Shockingly similar to the kind of maintenance error that brought down TWA, a tiny piece of metal wire had not been installed to secure a hydraulic actuator.
For the first time, Seventeen Days and Seventeen Miles Apart reveals a gut- wrenching account of why TWA, Lockheed, Howard Hughes, and even a top administrator from the FAA took no responsibility for this debacle. Following the crash in Chicago, Lockheed had nothing to say, as it faced lawsuits caused by other fatal Electra crashes. Its own mistakes led to the Electra fleet being grounded and the corporation later filing for bankruptcy.
More than a half-century later, Boeing ignored these lessons when its 737 MAX airliners crashed and killed 346 people aboard.
