Neil Hopcroft

[Audiobook]

Bracing for Impact: True tales of Air Disasters and the People who Survived Them by Robin Suerig Holleran and Lindy Philip

This is a harrowing book, with vivid descriptions of air crashes survived. The readers voice brings a tense melancholy to the stories too, which adds to that sense of despair relieved, but still ever so present.

I chose this book because I am interested in the kinds of improvements the air industry makes to their processes and how they go about making those improvements. The tools they have put in place to aid those investigations, the telemetry and voice recording. There is little of that side of things in this book, however, covering more of the personal impact of these disasters.

I once found an archive of audio recordings of runway incursions, which contain some frightening interactions between planes and control towers, youtube adds a visual dimension to these situations, like the Midway incursion, Southwest 2504 Going Around.

The situations described in the book are mostly small planes and all of them were survivable, the stories are from those survivors. There are a few larger craft included, which show up some of the disorganisation of ground crews around troubled arrivals and departures, with airports often thrown into chaos following an accident.

The survivors themselves go one way or the other, either seeing they have a purpose and pursing it with vigour, or becoming despondent and losing themselves in vice, often to awaken a few years later with a purpose. Getting back in the air is obviously traumatic for a number of them, nearly all manage to fly again with various degrees of sedation or anxiety.

Overall, this is not an easy book, it likely has more resonance with those who have, or been close to those who have, survived such a crash. Not for the faint of heart.