2019 non-fiction, aviation history. Wrigley looks into a number of
cases of aircraft oddities, particularly disappearances.
There's a fair diversity both of incidents and of styles here.
For something like the disappearance of MH370 the emphasis is mostly
on the air traffic control procedure, and why the aircraft's loss of
communication and deviation from course weren't noticed; for Foxtrot
94, the Lightning lost in 1970, it's more about the state of evidence
as it changed over the years. Some of these incidents have
well-understood explanations; most don't, and some are likely to
remain entirely mysterious. Dan Cooper is here (the "DB" was made up
by a journalist later), and that's barely an aviation mystery at all.
There are good lay explanations of the technical points needed to
understand voice transcripts and similar, but Wrigley mostly refrains
from speculation, laying out the likely possibilities and reasons why
the simple explanations wouldn't cover everything, but avoiding the
temptation to come up with fresh theories. The writing in general is
mostly clear and entertaining, but occasionally gets muddled.
Most frustrating of course are the inconsistencies with no
explanation. Why did an aircraft loss start off being written up as a
mid-air collision, then get quietly re-analysed to remove all mention
of the possibility of another aircraft, even though the evidence
pointing to it was still there on the wreck? The Foxtrot 94 incident
is an example of this sort of thing making eventual sense: the RAF and
USAF sat for some decades on an embarrassing detail (that the pilot
had not completed training in a particular class of manoeuvre and was
sent on that particular mission by accident), and the usual chancers
fabulated tales of UFOs and even an entirely fake cockpit voice
transcript to "explain" the incident.
There's no overall argument being made here (unless perhaps it's
"aviation can be very hard, and maintenance really matters") but I
enjoyed reading it nonetheless.