Overview

On 19 July 1989, while United Airlines flight 232 wallowed drunkenly northwest of the airport at Sioux City, Iowa, hundreds of fire and rescue workers waited. The plane slammed onto the runway, broke into pieces and burst into a fireball. The rescue workers did not move: nobody could survive that crash. And then people began walking out of the field lining the runway. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived—138, unhurt. Laurence Gonzales, interviewed dozens of the survivors of Flight 232. He takes the reader through the detective work that found the fatal flaw in an exploded titanium fan disk. More powerful still is the heroism he found: pilots flying a plane with no controls; flight attendants keeping their calm in the face of certain death; passengers sacrificing themselves to save others.

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9780393351262

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Reviews

Flight 232 remains a deeply moving and compassionate work, one that really brings home the impact of disaster and survival on everyday lives. A book to be proud of. -- The Big Issue Gonzalez... delivers the goods in exhaustive, relentless fashion. -- The Times

This might just be the best aviation book you'll read this year. Intense, gripping, alive with knowledge and compassion, Flight 232 is a new masterpiece of calamity and courage. -- Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb A kind of miracle. Gonzales combines meticulous research, intense and even agonizing drama, and a soaring intensity of emotion. Flight 232 leaves one feeling exalted, not depressed, at the end of a book about a grisly air crash that spares no details. The instances of heroism and self-sacrifice in the face of unimaginable horror are countless, and rendered with a spare dignity that rises above the macabre. -- Michael Korda, former RAF pilot, and author of Clouds of Glory: The Life of Robert E. Lee The definitive account ... Flight 232 stands alone: for its absolutely riveting depiction of the flight's last minutes and the horrendous aftermath; for its vivid and sympathetic portraits of many of those aboard the plane, the crew most particularly; and for its meticulous inquiry into the mechanical failure. -- Jonathan Yardly Fascinating ... a remarkably vivid, cinematic account, with one cliffhanger after the other. -- John Quinlan A white knuckle read, so vividly detailed that it's like watching an accident in slow-motion and being unable to look away. -- Jennifer Latson A book that bears witness to the dead, and to the extraordinary courage of ordinary people; ... a thriller, with a mystery at its core. -- Rachel Rose

Author Information

Laurence Gonzales is the author of Surviving Survival and the bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He has won two National Magazine Awards and is a fellow of the Santa Fe Institute. His essays are collected in the book House of Pain. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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