Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Airframe: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Airframe: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Airframe: A Novel
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Airframe: A Novel

    Written by Michael Crichton

    Narrated by Blair Brown

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin virtually destroyed. But the pilot manages to land the plane. . . .

    At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner bound from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation.

    Airframe is nonstop reading: the extraordinary mixture of super suspense and authentic information on a subject of compelling interest that has been a Crichton landmark since The Andromeda Strain.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 4, 2000
    ISBN9780375418570
    Unavailable
    Airframe: A Novel
    Author

    Michael Crichton

    Michael Crichton (1942-2008) was the author of the bestselling novels The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, Sphere, Disclosure, Prey, State of Fear, Next and Dragon Teeth, among many others. His books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, have been translated into forty languages, and have provided the basis for fifteen feature films. He wrote and directed Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, Runaway, Looker, Coma and created the hit television series ER. Crichton remains the only writer to have a number one book, movie, and TV show in the same year. Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and author of the New York Times bestselling Robopocalypse and its sequel Robogenesis, as well as ten other books. He recently wrote the Earth 2: Society comic book series for DC Comics. Wilson earned a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as master’s degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He has published over a dozen scientific papers and holds four patents. Wilson lives in Portland, Oregon.

    More audiobooks from Michael Crichton

    Related to Airframe

    Related audiobooks

    Thrillers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Reviews for Airframe

    3.5/5

    1,537 ratings52 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      An airplane flying from Hong Kong to Denver suddenly starts to porpoise through he sky killing three passengers and injuring many more. Immediately the company that made the plane starts to investigate what went wrong. This starts a story that is full of information about what makes an airplane fly and the many safety features that are created to ensure we all arrive at our destination safe.When the accident happened, it was days before a Chinese airline was going to purchase hundreds of this craft. So is it a safe plane or should the Chinese look at at Airbus? A TV news program senses a chance to damage a large corporation and starts planing a show that will look to scare the public but damn the truth. There are union issues that cause problems for the company as well as the global economy forcing jobs overseas.The heroine, Casey Singleton, is in charge of Quality Assurance but as the novel proceeds she is also put on the hot seat doing press interviews and fighting off union thugs. This is a fast but interesting read set in the pre 911 era as cockpit doors are open and pilots walk through the cabin talking to the passengers.
    • 5/5
      Good read. A little heavy on description in some places, but fascinating, nevertheless. Story line is both educational and good and a little frightening. The last third of the book turns into a "page-turner", crying out to be read in one sitting.
    • 3/5
      This was mildly entertaining. There was so much exposition necessary to make the book make sense that it tended to drag quite a bit. Some parts of the book were fun, such as the parts featuring the news magazine, but it was mostly rather slow-moving. It's been a long time since I read a Crichton novel and I can't say as how I'm all excited to read another.
    • 3/5
      Interesting beginning, but soon the technical stuff starts slowing you down. Good pace otherwise, and satisfying ending.
    • 3/5
      I read this a few decades ago. Entertaining in a beach read sort of way.
    • 1/5
      To be fair to novel, I think I didn't do it proper justice. After all, I read it in a "Crichton Novels Marathon", and it was preceded by novels like Jurassic Park, The Lost World, The Andromeda Strain and Timeline, and succeeded by Sphere, Congo, Prey, Eaters of the Dead and Pirate Latitudes. Most of these novels contain a theme of grand scale; they involve something grand and fascinating. To me, Airframe reduced to a mystery-thriller novel, which I found weaker than the other novels of Crichton. This may be the reason that I haven't yet read Disclosure.
    • 5/5
      Michael Crichton books keep you guessing! I enjoyed every minute of this and didn’t want to put it down.
    • 5/5
      This is a real cotton candy book. It was truly a guilty pleasure. Junk food of books and I loved it. Casey Singleton is the only female vice president of Norton Aircraft and her job is to find out why three people died and 56 were injured on a flight of one of Norton's airplanes. The initial cause was thought to be turbulence. This was kind of freaky because the day after I finished this book, a United flight, in real life, went through the same thing.
    • 2/5
      A decent enough book but its hard for me to call it a 'thriller' when the main conflict centers around figuring out why an airplane almost crashed. Sure, there were some union 'troubles' thrown in to add conflict, but at the end of the day the tension has to derive from someone reading technical details about flight mechanics. If that's your thing, you'll probably enjoy this one more than I did.
    • 3/5
      An interesting view on the Airline industry. Not a whole lot of excitement, but overall a decent read...
    • 3/5
      Two and a half stars. First Crichton book I've read. A fast read. Light weight thriller/suspense novel. Cardboard characters. Technical detail heavy story telling, with a simplistic cliched plot. Best part for me was reflecting on how much of the world has changed since this was published in 1996.
    • 3/5
      Pretty dry, and the suspense is lacking. I most enjoyed the engineering discussions.
    • 4/5
      It's slightly dated now - I can't imagine that a significant portion of the population even knows what a pager it (hint it's a very limited twitter DM). - but at the same time, the point and forescast that Chrichton was making, has come true. You can ignore pretty much the every reference to any of the airplane technological bits, they're just background to the real story. They make a pretty hook, but that's it. It's quite possible that Chrichton has got some minor details wrong somewhere, and it wouldn't matter. The story is about image and media representation. Caesy Singleton is a QA rep to a company that builds areoplanes. SHe's aprt of a team investigating a recent incident, a process which usually takes months. Unfortunately some passengers died, and so there's media interest in the causes (although only after several days which is very odd). Casey's given just a week to come up with an answer. This in and of itself would be a challenge, but of course she doesn't just need the right answer, she needs an answer that she can sell to the media within a minute or so of 'live' TV. (these days that's down to less than 15 seconds!). And so the pressure is on between her trying to find a simple explanation for a very complex problem, and the newsline producer who has to fill a few minutes of a prime tine show. It's a great read, clever as always from Chrichton - and worth bearing in mind every time you see something sensational online. The truth is inevitably far more complicated than that. There's no reason why we the public who pay for the news couldn't be given the real story, and walked through the complexities. But it takes time, doesn't always produce anything shocking, and so doesn't happen.Read it.
    • 3/5
      I'd forgotten how good Crichton's books were and this one is pretty great. It's written from the point of view of Casey a divorced Mom who's a Quality Assurance VP at the fictional Norton Company.It's an airplane crash thriller with one big change, there's technically no crash of the plan. Which I think makes the story more interesting. Like a murder mystery without a murder.And this book is a bit of a mystery. Mostly it's a thriller, there are veiled threats from the union at the plant, and brainy thrills as Casey tries to stay ahead of what seems like a plane full of people with all different agendas.The plot is good, but what's really great about Airframe is Crichton's writing. In this book and in his others he had this knack for putting the science/engineering/technical details in there and not making it all seem like part of the story and not just an exposition dump.I do wish that there'd been a bit more at the end, the conclusion and tying up of all the stories seemed a bit rushed. Not to mention Crichton never really tied up the ex-husband and their child story which I thought was an interesting subplot.
    • 4/5
      Good characterizations. Excellent story-line (I didn't read the blurb first, so it was interesting to see what it was about). Great factuality. Thrilling.
    • 4/5
      An airliner travelling from China to the US has an in-air incident, first characterized as turbulence but costing 3 lives plus more than 50 injuries. What follows is an investigation by the plane manufacturer...amidst some contentious opinions from air travel pundits The plane had a well-documented flaw, and everyone was quick to jump on it as the cause. But airliners are designed with redundant systems, and failure is often a series of unlikely, cascading events.Casey Singleton, an executive for the airplane manufacturer, is charged with leading the investigation. It is not, however, a single investigation of an isolated event. While this is going on, China, the owner of the plane in question, has a contract proposal for a lot of planes that Casey's company is the front-runner. There are some that do not want this deal to go through -- and in her own company! The unions and one upper executive in particular are setting her up to be the fall guy. On top of this, the leading news show is doing a piece -- and seems intent on taking down her company. The late Michael Crichton could write the phone book and make it interesting. While some of the technology covered is already dated (noticeable only by frequent fliers), the story was nevertheless riveting and entertaining. I haven't read all of Crichton's books yet, but I haven't been disappointed by anything that wasn't published before his death.
    • 3/5
      A dull story line. Definitely not his best.
    • 3/5
       A bit slower than other Crichton books, but still a good read.
    • 4/5
      This is my first Crichton since the Andromeda Strain written so many years ago. Another reason to ignore the professional critics who have not been terribly kind to Crichton in the past few years. I really liked this book. It has a marvelous blend of science, information and a good plot that keeps the pages turning.

      It’s interesting that many of the reviews I read focused on the aircraft industry. I think the book is more about the media and it’s relentless pursuit of the visual and the sound bite at the expense of truth and the whole picture more than about airplanes.

      Enroute from Hong Kong to Denver, a brand new Norton-22, a plane clearly modeled on the Boeing 747, pitches and dives like a porpoise before being brought under control. The violent maneuvers kill three passengers and injures 56 others. . The airline's VP in charge of quality assurance — Casey Singleton — has to find out why, before more passengers and the airline's future go into a tailspin. As always in Crichton's expert hands, readers learn a lot about science while becoming enmeshed in the power-plays, office politics, and pressures of the global market and American jobs. Her job is complicated, because, as we gradually learn, powers within the company are trying to manipulate her and to embarrass the company so that the president of the company can be forced out in favor of another. Casey is saddled with a Norton family nephew who turns out to be a spy for one of the other company officers. We learn a great deal about aircraft manufacture and design — I must admit to really loving the technical detail — as Casey tries to figure out why the cockpit reports of turbulence differ from physical evidence of a “commanded slat deployment,” something, that even had it occurred at altitude and high speed should not have caused the plane to go out-of-control the way it appears to have done.

      Crichton obviously doesn’t like lawyers, their stoolies (an ex-FAA employee who testifies for the plaintiffs in injury suits figures prominently in the media’s desire to create a nasty story) nor the media, and a character clearly modeled after Mike Wallace has few redeeming qualities. At one point Casey is to be interviewed by the Wallace character, Marty Reardon, and a company PR person comes by to help her prepare a little. “There’s only one more thing I can tell you, Katherine. You work in a complex business. If you try to explain that complexity to Marty, you’ll be frustrated. You’ll feel he isn’t interested. He’ll probably cut you off. Because he isn’t interested. A lot of people complain television lacks focus. But that’s the nature of the medium. Television’s not about information at all. Information is active, engaging. Television is passive. Information is disinterested, objective. Television is emotional. It’s entertainment. . . . [Marty’s:] paid to exercise his one reliable talent: provoking people, getting them to make an emotional outburst, to lose their temper, to say something outrageous. He doesn’t really want to know about airplanes. He wants a media moment.”

      Casey’s father was a journalist and an old friend of his remarks at the end of the book, “Used to be — in the old days-- the media image roughly corresponded to reality. But now it’s all reversed. The media image is the reality, and by comparison day-to-day life seems to lack excitement. So now day-to-day life is false, and the media image is true. Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It’s bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.”

    • 3/5
      Pretty light and fluffy. Airplane reading, quite literally. Crichton does delve pretty deep into aviation jargon, so the start of the book is satisfyingly crunchy and technical. But the characters come off too flat -- there's almost something pedagogical about it. I felt as though Crichton was trying to teach me why privatizing the commercial flight sector was a bad idea, and how it can only result in corner-cutting and danger to the flying public. The argument came off as a bit one-sided. It's true that the media is often sensational and hungry for simple explanations, but I'd like to believe it's not really as bad as the book makes it seem.

      A nice, fun, quick read.
    • 4/5
      This subject could be dead boring but Crichton makes it a can't-put-down story.
    • 3/5
      A fun mystery quick read.
    • 4/5
      This is another stellar installment by Michael Crichton. When an airplane lands with dead/wounded passengers and a completely destroyed cabin, Casey must attempt to discover what caused the unusual event. As usual, Crichton expertly blends nonfiction elements into this sleek thriller. This is a really good read.
    • 2/5
      all plot, no character- & even the plot is weak
    • 4/5
      Airframe by Michael Crichton, I like this book because Michael really describes everything very well, like when he introduces the main character Casey and the job she does. It is really interesting how he goes about telling the proses of an airplane accident and how it is solved. The plot line of the book is really interesting to and puts thing into reality for instance, when Casey sees Richard's car, she tells him to get an American made car the workers on the floor wont like seeing that in the parking lot. Later Casey get a threat call and there are people outside of her house she thinks they are going to come into the house and kill her but they are guards making sure she is safe. That was really scary for me when that happened because i have never ever thought about it and how it can really change your life. Also when someone on the floor (where the planes are made) went after Casey because they thought she was putting the company on the edge and basically ending it. Another thing i liked about Airframe was how you thought you know what was going to happen next and things were going to be fine and then boom it was just a minor part of a huge plan that you never was coming. That is why i liked airframe.
    • 5/5
      Another great book from Michael Crichton where a plane suddenly has terrible turbulence, which causes many injuries, and the maker of the plane has to investigate to see what caused the problems. A great mystery.
    • 4/5
      I really hate flying. I'm not scared of it, I just dislike being herded into inky-dinky seats meant for short people by ill-tempered sky-waiters who charge for pillows and booze, and then I have to pay more than I used to make a week for the privilege of being searched, patted by men I'm not attracted to in places I don't want to be patted unless I am, etc etc etc.Fifteen years ago, all that was more or less to come, and storymonger Crichton used planes for a very different kind of tale. What happens to cause a huge section of a plane to go *flooey*, killing a few people and making the entire world nervous about flying? We're about to find out, Casey Singleton and the reader that is. We're going to go into surprisingly interesting amounts of detail about the structure, the manufacture, the sales, the service, the use of airplanes, and how a careful planner could cause huge havoc in a few, small, seemingly innocuous ways.I miss Michael Crichton. He understood the value of detail, the urgency of tight plotting, and the uncomplicated pleasure of following a complicated and logical plot to its only possible ending. If I didn't have Steve Berry, I'd be visiting Crichton's grave once a year with 200 roses to mourn his passing.LitSnobs take note...turn up your noses and all that happens is us groundlings who like books that are fun get an unobstructed view of your boogers.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed Airframe. It is about an incident on a commercial airline and its aftermath. From different points of view (e.g., Casey, a vice president at the company that manufactured the aircraft; Jennifer, a power-hungry reporter) you see different players trying to determine what went wrong. The plot is firmly focused on this incident from a technical point of view--there definitely is a lot of jargon and technical language, but Crichton always finds ways to explain it clearly. There are some subplots that are not at all well flushed-out (a suspicious assistant, an alcoholic ex husband) and unfortunately don't do too much for the book.In my opinion, for a brief Crichton comparison, I found Airframe to be immensely better than Next, but not as good as Jurassic Park or Timeline.It was a quick and light read, and it was interesting to learn a little bit about commercial aircraft production and corporate issues. Though I wouldn't call it suspenseful necessarily, there was a driving plot that kept me wanting to know what would happen next--Crichton keeps your curiosity going.
    • 1/5
      i had a hard time reading this. it was very boring.it had a good plot, but he did not pull it off. oh and for that moron who said its was better that timefram, its timline you dumass.
    • 3/5
      A big airplane deal with the chinese looming in the distant and a problem abored a Norton-22 causes a few fatalities and 56 injuries jeopardizing the sale. Follow the intrigue as the mystery as to how this happend unfolds.Classic Crichton picking a topic and showing a side no one ever thinks to look at. I really enjoyed it although some spots get a little technical for a little too long. Overall good solid read.