One of our own, AMT magazine contributor Stephen Carbone has written a new novel – with a foreword by John Goglia – about the world that we live in; a career we love or hate depending on the day, trip or shift. Carbone has worked on both the labor and management side of the aisle for the airlines, been a safety inspector for the FAA and the rare accident investigator for the NTSB – one with an A&P Certificate. These experiences helped him set the stage for his novel and develop those complicated characters that we all know but by different names. This novel is also a cautionary tale about our over reliance on sophisticated technology that is managing flight and maintenance systems of our modern aircraft.
Our novel begins in that moment of terror when a random system fault occurs in a reliably predictable aircraft, resulting in uncontrolled behavior and near tragic consequences. This phantom fault is the antagonist of Carbone’s novel, turning the next event into tragedy: an accident in Memphis, TN.
In commercial aviation, the NSTB, FAA, pilots, maintenance technicians, and engineers only make the headlines when they would rather not. Preferring anonymity, they move inconspicuously through the major airports, aisles of cube world, and the factory floor; they are as easy to dismiss as a pop-up on your computer screen. Most often they reluctantly arrive on the public stage when something has gone very, very wrong.
Carbone understands this well when describing our complex aviation culture and the symbiotic relationships that exist between our regulatory agency staff, corporate owners, operators, manufacturers, aircraft flight and ground crew members. Here Carbone takes a back seat, allowing the protagonist Daniel Tenace, a skilled and dedicated NTSB accident investigator, to lead us through the Rubik’s Cube of Washington, D.C.’s agencies with their inflated egos and hapless bureaucrats, the world of profit driven airlines, and the exponential complexity of modern aviation technology.
This is Dan’s world; as he investigates the accident he takes us from the streets and bureaucracies of Washington, D.C., through the complexities of modern airliner systems, down through the gates of Boolean logic circuits with ease and clarity. Some of the landscape that he traverses will be as familiar to AMTs as their own toolbox and many will identify with Dan as he struggles to prove that when a modern multiengine jet crashes it should not be dismissed as pilot or mechanic error; instead it is a complex string of events both human and technological that caused the unfortunate fatal event.
Dan is obsessed with only a few things in life: his family, aviation safet, and finding the truth when he is investigating an aircraft crash. In this nail bitter you are quickly caught up as he unravels this technological mystery using his maintenance experience and the single-mindedness of a Sherlock Holmes. For the final solution he and a dedicated flight crew will take an airliner up to recreate the tragic scenario in an attempt to identify the deadly fault that he suspects was the cause.
Carbone pulls you into the cockpit as the test airliner’s flight becomes a desperate fight for survival over the heavily populated West Coast. Will the crew survive? Will the truth be known? Is aviation forever at risk?
An exciting must read for everyone that ever piloted an airliner, designed a mod, or – especially – turned a wrench.
Well Done Stephen
