Title: Unsafe at Any Altitude
Author: Richard Francis Schaden
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 1664167056
Pages: 252
Genre: Non-Fiction
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Warning: Do not read this book while flying. It will really scare you.
Author Richard Francis Schaden, who has clocked many thousands of hours as an aviator and a plaintiff’s attorney in air crash cases, takes the reader on a marrow-chilling tour of a number of air disasters – great and small.
No air disaster involving the loss of life or limb is small. Once we are buckled in, our seats upright and ready for takeoff, we have handed our lives over to the stewardship of professionals trained to stay the course – safely. If only it were that simple! One of the many mordant take-home lessons from this book is that pilot error may account for only a fraction of catastrophes in the air. Faulty aircraft design, the hidden culprit, is actually responsible for a significant number of crashes.
Schaden and the other pilots, living and dead, described in this remarkable book emerge for the most part as heroes, as men and women who can take a grievously dangerous situation and make it right. These pilots can literally fly and land a jet plane with all but one engine out. The killing element in many crashes, we learn, is faulty air design. Attorney-pilot Schaden carefully and patiently explains how improper placement of engines (engines too low to the ground, for example, tend to sweep in ground refuse from airports) and less than perfect choice of materials (which can lead to tearing off of critical plane parts, like vertical tails) can make for a perfect storm of death and destruction.
The planes described in this cautionary book are familiar to most of us. Air disaster is the great leveler, striking great and small planes alike. Travelers who use smaller craft, such as planes in Caribbean island-to-island hops, and those who fly from city to city on jumbo jets, will readily and uncomfortably recognize these aircraft. Schaden tempers his account with cautious optimism, and prescribes as he proceeds a number of practical engineering, monitoring and legislative measures that could result in significant diminution of morbidity and mortality on the runways and in the skies.
Some words about the author: Schaden is a remarkable man. Absolutely. He is modest and even self-critical at times but nonetheless he emerges as the quintessential air pioneer and hero. While investigating a horrific jumbo jet crash that occurred off Long Island, resulting in many hundreds of deaths, he actually commandeers a boat and scuba dives to a depth of 100 feet to examine the plane’s remnants on the floor of the Atlantic. Not only that, but, in disguise, he sneaks into an aircraft hangar on Long Island where the doomed aircraft has been pieced together by wreck divers. This exhibit was carefully guarded, not open to the public, but Schaden managed to get in.
The artifice, manipulativeness and greed of aircraft companies and their insurers comes across loud and clear on almost page of this book. Unsafe at Any Altitude takes its title from an earlier book by muckraker Ralph Nader on the evils of the auto industry.
Like that volume, Schaden’s book may incite enough unrest and inquiry to foment necessary changes in a publicly accountable publicly responsible industry.
