Final Approach
Ratings1
Average rating5
15
Ratings1
Average rating5
An airliner attempting a bad-weather landing in a Midwest city plows into another awaiting takeoff. With more than 100 people dead, the National Transportation Safety Board assigns Joe Wallingford to investigate. Was the disaster caused by human error or by technical malfunction? Did outside electronic interference, perhaps from a top-secret SDI radar, disrupt flight controls? Nance, a leading airline safety analyst and author of nonfiction works on aviation, debuts as a novelist with a first-rate technical detective story. While keeping readers in suspense, he explores the dynamics of factions within the safety bureaucracy and limns the problems raised for airline management by deregulation. With realistic dialogue and convincing characters, particularly Wallingford and Senator Kell Martinson, this nonmilitary techno-thriller is a sure winner.
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DNF @ 44%
Let me start off by saying that I'm an aviation enthusiast, and I was very excited to read a book like this. At first, I was having a lot of fun reading things from a pilot's POV and the thrill of understanding the aviation lingo. The book started off strong with an interesting plot, but that quickly devolved into a slow and meandering mess. Just about every character that gets mentioned in the book gets their own POV and it gets confusing and exhausting to keep track of. I wanted an interesting aviation mystery/thriller, but what I got instead was a headache.
Finally, want to join the club of people complaining about the absolutely insane amount of characters that are introduced, most of them mid-chapter. I was reading this on my kindle and I had so many “wtf” moments because it's difficult to tell when one character's section ends and another begins. And the characters that are introduced? Most of them are absolutely pointless and just add to the confusion. A cashier at a gas station gets her own section because she interacts off page with another pointless side character.
I'm trying to focus on reading books I enjoy instead of forcing myself to finish books I've started, so this is my first DNF of 2024. Sunk-cost fallacy be damned.
