Saturday, April 13, 2013

Bali Plane Crash & DeMille's Night Fall


I posted about airliner glitches a few weeks ago but, thankfully, there haven't been any major crashes in the news since then.  That changed with a major crash yesterday.  The good news is everyone on board survived. 

Here's today's BBC coverage, "All survive after jet lands in sea off Bali Indonesia:"
An airliner has ended up in the sea off the Indonesian island of Bali after missing Denpasar airport runway, but all those on board survived.
Hospitals treated 22 people after the crash, which involved an Indonesian Lion Air plane carrying 101 passengers and seven crew. Photos posted on Twitter showed the jet with its fuselage cracked, sitting in water near rocks, with dinghies nearby.
The Boeing 737 was on a domestic flight from Bandung in West Java. It missed the runway reportedly from a height of 50m (yards) and landed in the ocean nearby. Terrified passengers made their way ashore through the shallow water in life jackets as police in rubber dinghies rowed out to rescue them.
A transport ministry official told BBC News it was too early to talk about what had caused the plane - a new Boeing 737-800 - to crash.
For a novel about a plane crash, try Night Fall by Nelson DeMille:
The book is centered on an investigation of the July 1996 crash of flight TWA 800, "when... a big Boeing 747 bound for Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded off the Atlantic coast of Long Island, sending all 230 souls to their deaths."
In July 2001, Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force detective John Corey, a brilliant, smart-ass detective last seen in Plum Island and The Lion's Game, accompanies his FBI agent wife, Kate Mayfield, to the fifth anniversary of the disaster. John, whose wife worked the crash in 1996, understands that Kate has brought him along because she doesn't buy the official finding of "mechanical failure" and wants him to mount his own investigation.

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