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A Story of Disaster and Survival
W.W. Norton
July 2014
On Sale: July 1, 2014
445 pages ISBN: 0393240029 EAN: 9780393240023 Kindle: B00FQUDSFS Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Twenty-five years after the catastrophe, a dramatic and
extraordinarily rare 360-degree view of the crash of a fully
loaded jumbo jet. As hundreds of rescue workers waited on the ground, United
Airlines Flight 232 wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs
northwest of Sioux City. The plane slammed onto the runway
and burst into a vast fireball. The rescuers didn't move at
first: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then
people began emerging from the summer corn that lined the
runways. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived. No one has ever attempted the complete reconstruction of a
crash of this magnitude. Drawing on interviews with hundreds
of survivors, crew, and airport and rescue personnel,
Laurence Gonzales, a commercial pilot himself, captures,
minute by minute, the harrowing journey of pilots flying a
plane with no controls and flight attendants keeping their
calm in the face of certain death. He plumbs the hearts and
minds of passengers as they pray, bargain with God, plot
their strategies for survival, and sacrifice themselves to
save others. Ultimately he takes us, step by step, through the gripping
scientific detective work in super-secret labs to dive into
the heart of a flaw smaller than a grain of rice that shows
what brought the aircraft down. An unforgettable drama of the triumph of heroism over
tragedy and human ingenuity over technological breakdown,
Flight 232 is a masterpiece in the tradition of the
greatest aviation stories ever told.
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