Airframe (novel)

Airframe [ ɛɹ ˌ fɹeɪm ] is a novel by Michael Crichton that was published in 1996.

As Airframe (of English frame: frame ) is called in the aircraft industry to completely built-up fuselage of an aircraft, including all technical installations. However, the title is also a play on words with the English idiom: to frame somebody ( = someone fooled ).

Action

The plot is driven as a business thriller and plays in the American- Asian economy in the present. The story is based on a true story, which was projected into a fictional plot.

The novel is about a plane crash of a big machine room above the Pacific Ocean. Casey Singleton, head of the production control of the aircraft manufacturer in the United States, is under the high pressure of having to find out within a few days, so it could come to this incident with three dead and forty injured. The company Norton Aircraft threatens namely an eight- billion-dollar contract with the Chinese government to burst if Casey can not prove that the design of the aircraft was technically flawless.

In addition, the infamous television program " Newsline " has learned of the accident and received from an anonymous source sent a video showing the incident. So that the incident is clearly due to the fault of the aircraft manufacturer for the media. The journalist Jennifer Malone, who wants to present himself in the campaign against the allegedly unsafe aircraft, flying later during a test flight, undergoing that specified by the press because of the incident turns out to be wrong.

Towards the end it becomes known that the experienced captain John Zhen Chang for a few minutes his son has let fly, the case of a - got minor technical defect in panic, was heading towards the autopilot and thus provoked a series of dives - caused by counterfeit parts.

Background

The novel openly criticizes the subjective flow of information through the mass media, which is now subject to daily "normal " citizens. Crichton addresses the policy issue of press freedom. He raises the question of whether the fundamental right of freedom of the press has unlimited benefits or dangers. Through the false information that is conveyed in the media, the company in Crichton's novel are facing a severe economic loss and as a consequence of bankruptcy - and not least the loss of many jobs. The assumed in the book hostility of the European regulatory authorities against American planes here reflects the turned- political competition between Boeing and Airbus and the U.S. and the European aeronautics and space industry in general.

The author wishes to inform his work but also about the safety of air transport. It represents the aircraft as the statistically safest form of transport dar.