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The Book of the Week is “Freefall, A True Story” by William Hoffer and Marilyn Mona Hoffer, published in 1989. The authors told a suspenseful story of a July 1983 Air Canada Boeing 767 flight that went awry. The authors caught the human interest element of the story as well, revealing biographical information on the passengers so that the reader would relate to and sympathize with the characters.
“Four more insistent beeps sounded, disrupting conversation. The cockpit was assailed by eerie warning buzzers and foreboding color-coded lights alerting them to a series of problems escalating in severity.”
As is well known, commercial aviation is an industry especially fraught with danger. There are always multiple causes for disasters. Flight 143 ran into trouble for the following reasons:
- The Boeing model 767 had been launched only three months before, so workers had yet to work out all its kinks and update its three different flight manuals.
- The plane’s different flight-related measurements used a mix of the metric system and the imperial system, so there was confusion, and there were miscalculations.
- The Canadian agency that regulated commercial aviation allowed cockpit-visitors, who might be a distraction to the plane crew.
- There were miscommunications among the pilots, the flight staff, and a myriad of workers who maintained the plane.
- Air traffic controllers were still using the outdated system of “primary radar” at Winnipeg’s airport.
- A delay on the first leg of the flight due to a mechanical problem, a malfunctioning of the plane’s movie projector in the rear cabin, and undercooked food, resulted in additional stresses for the pilots, crew and passengers.
- The airline’s workers were always under time-pressure every flight, as time is money. Their employer lost money every time there was a delay, so they rushed their assessment of the situation.
- The airline’s cost-cutting measures meant two pilots had to do the work of three. The workers who were tasked with different jobs spoke English and / or French so there could easily have been something lost in translation, and cultural clashes.
Read the book to learn the fate of the people on the plane and on the ground.