I remember, vividly, the crash of THY flight 981 over Ermenonville. I was fifteen. TRT (Turkish Radio TV) was the only show in the country and broadcast in black and white. It was a Sunday afternoon. The news alert of the downed flight was first flashed across the screen during some regularly scheduled program. As the afternoon went on, we started to get special reports in between regularly scheduled programs as black and white images of the crash site got filtered through the news agencies. I remember being glued to the screen, now regarding the regularly scheduled programs as interruptions, listening to theories as to why the plane went down, to the updates on the number of people aboard the jumbo jet, which kept creeping up as the passenger manifesto had to be readjusted due to the confusion caused by the BA strike, and watching the same gruesome black and white images over and over again.
I saw Destination Disaster on the Recently Acquired Books section of my high school library. When I noticed "DC-10" in the subtitle, I immediately checked it out. The vivid account of the Ermenonville disaster in Chapter 1 got me off to a quick start. Although English was not my first language, the book was an easy read. The fact that there were a few words per page which I would have to look up in a dictionary did not deter my appetite; I quickly put the dictionary away and devoured the book like I would a detective novel. I was fascinated by the investigative effort that had gone into this book. I thought, at the time, that it had an excellent balance between sensational (but necessary) accounts, historical fact and technical detail.
When the THY Boeing 737 went down in Amsterdam earlier this year (2009), I somehow remembered reading a book on the DC-10 disasters in my youth. I had long forgotten its title and had never paid attention to its authors in the first place. After poring over results of an Amazon book search, I first ordered a wrong book and then ordered Destination Disaster. The second read through the book, after 30 some years, is as exciting as the first read. Having lived in the United States since 1982, I no longer consider English as my second language and find that, this time, I do not have the urge to consult a dictionary every 5 minutes. I am now reading the book as an engineering educator and am wondering how I can incorporate it in an interdisciplinary book study.
It is an excellent book that documents all aspects of engineering design, from financial, political and competitive factors to unintended yet predictable results of the choices of decision makers in the design process. ( )