Airframe, a novel by Michael Crichton was a fairly good book that became very exciting towards the end. It is about the aviation industry and a fictional company named Norton Aircraft that manufactures planes. There is only one main character and the plot of the novel is about a secret plan to destroy the president of Norton. The book gets off to a slow start, but rapidly builds up pace in the last hundred pages. The main character of the novel is Casey Singleton. She is a divorced mother in her mid-forties. She is a vice president of the Quality Assurance Incident Review Team.
Whenever anything goes wrong with a plane that was made by Norton, the Incident Review Team finds out what the problem was and fixes it. The whole book is based on her and her actions. If there had to be two more supporting characters, one would be John Marder. He is the chief operating officer of Norton Aircraft. In other words, he runs the factory. He has also been nice to Casey, but he turns out to be a very bad person and “sly guy. ” The third important character in the novel Airframe is Jennifer Malone. She is a reporter for a news show called Newsline.
From the descriptions in the book, this show sounds very much like the news program 20/20. She does a news story on the two latest events of the N-22 aircraft that has had unusual problems lately. She does not understand what the aviation industry is about so she has a very bad attitude. As a result, Casey ends up telling her off towards the end of the book. The plot of Airframe is a very complex and exciting plot. The book starts off with a bang with a suspenseful first chapter. An airplane encounters severe turbulence and many passengers are hurt.
Eventually a team at Norton is put together to find out what the cause of the situation is. The problem puts Norton’s airplane deal with China, for billions of dollars, in serious jeopardy. The team cannot find any leads, and soon the media catches on to Norton”s problems. The reporters love a story that is bad and makes the viewers concerned about airline safety. A lot of people are already concerned about airline safety. When the media advertises a bad story about manufacturers, everyone will watch it.
Casey finds herself in dangerous situations where people are following her and watching her. She knows something is wrong and there is some kind of secret plot. She figures it out in the last fourth of the novel but she does not tell the reader until she tells Jennifer Malone in the second chapter until the end. It turns out the whole incident was a pilot’s error. The experienced pilot let his own son fly the plane while he went to go get a cup of coffee. The son did not know what to do, so he almost crashed the plane.
Before Casey Singleton came to the simple answer above, she investigated many possibilities. One was that the slats on the wing extended without a command. Another was that the plane had counterfeit parts that supposedly damaged the plane. She found absolutely nothing. It turns out that John Marder was supposed to ruin Norton’s current president over this incident. He thought once a critical news story was shown on Newsline, that the president would be ruined as well as Casey Singleton since she was the one that handled the interview.
He had been cooking up a deal with North Korea to sell even more planes than Norton was preparing to sell to China. But he must become president before the deal would go through. Once the Korean sell was accomplished, Norton stock would sky-rocket which would make John Marder rich since he owned tons of it. This was all part of his plan but it was all ruined since the story did not air because it turned out it had been the pilot’s fault. Obviously, it was not the manufacturer”s fault. No one wanted to hear about a young kid killing three people and injuring hundreds.
It is plain and simple: it’s not good news. Marder was fired once his plot was uncovered and Casey Singleton took his place. There were many conflicts in Airframe. So many, you could not dare counting them all. Some of the main conflicts were between Casey Singleton and her colleagues. They got into arguments and disagreements all the time because they each believed something different caused the accident of the flight. There was a conflict about the men suspiciously following Casey who turned out to be John Marder employees.
The real main conflict in the novel was John Marder’s cover-up operation that could have easily destroyed Hal Edgarton, the president of Norton and Casey Singleton, the vice president of the QAR team. The theme or message of Airframe I personally think is that the media is way too powerful and greedy in this modern world. They can say anything they want anytime they want about anybody they want. The media is way too powerful. They don’t always speak the truth! It was definitely man versus society. Michael Crichton, the author of Airframe, was born in Chicago in 1942 but grew up in a suburb of New York.
Mr. Crichton attended Harvard Medical School to become a doctor. He always had an interest in writing and he wrote his first novel “In Case of Need” under a pseudonym of Jeffrey Hudson. He has also used John Lange as a pseudonym. Michael has written many novels and has won many awards. Michael Crichton also directs movies and is the author of the hit TV show “ER. ” His major novels include: Airframe, The Lost World, Disclosure, Rising Sun, Jurassic Park, Sphere, The Eaters of the Dead, The Great Train Robbery, The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, and In Case of Need.
I would recommend this novel to people who enjoy airplanes and advanced technology. It is an exceptional novel for people of all ages and should definitely be read. I think men and women both would like it, because the main character is a woman but the book has many manly themes. Overall, Airframe, is a great novel by Michael Crichton. Although it is not his best work, it is not anything to be ashamed of, either. It is a great novel about interesting airplanes and a suspenseful plot to ruin a major airline manufacturer. This book is the perfect ingredient in a recipe for a rainy, cold, winter’s day.
