Michael Crichton’s Airframe (1996) is a taut thriller about commercial jet production. It is a satisfying mystery with only a few flaws.

Katherine “Casey” Singleton has recently been appointed liaison to the Incident Response Team at Norton Aeronautics, one of the largest commercial airplane manufacturers in the world. She is immediately thrust into action investigating a mysterious accident aboard one of Norton’s jets en route from Hong Kong to Denver. What at first appears to be a structural malfunction may in fact be something different, something even worse.
Like John Grisham, Crichton writes novels that are hard to put down. Airframe takes place entirely within a fever-pitch week. The chapters are short, each one hooking well into the next. This is one of those books where you suddenly find yourself 200 pages into it.
Crichton clearly enjoys research, and it shows. His descriptions about how planes work and how they are made are on par with anything I might see on the Discovery Channel. I can almost see the on-screen graphics as he describes a jet’s wing and how it keeps all that weight aloft.
In similar fashion, Crichton describes the inner working of a television newsmagazine show from a segment producer’s angle. This gets injected late in the story as the shit is hitting the fan. It quickly became my favorite part of the story, arriving just as the airplane descriptions were getting a little long in the tooth. The pending news segment throws our heroine into a final crucible that will ultimately ruin or redeem the company.
Airframe has a few runaway moments and plotlines. A bit too much is made of a union dispute that is necessary to the plot, but overplayed for drama. The heroine is so embroiled in the mysteries involving the airplane and the troublesome flight that a companion mystery about corporate espionage gets short-changed. Speaking of mysteries, I wonder how the partially-dismantled jet got form Burbank to Yuma for its story-ending test flight?
These are minor flaws in an otherwise enthralling technical mystery. Airframe is a satisfying, very fast read.
Link to Airframe on Powells.com
Yes girl. I have definitely noticed that this author’s modus operandi is to go over the top. I mean, isn’t he the guy that brought dinosaurs back to life?
Do you think people would like his stories as much if he toned them down for realism?
I agree with Belinda if what Belinda is saying is that it’s perfectly okay for novels to go to extremes in how they tell their stories. That’s what makes escaping to them kind of fun. I often find myself saying it’s not supposed to be real it’s just a story.