Flight 232 by Laurence Gonzalez
Flight 232 by Laurence Gonzalez
If you want an opportunity to read about humanity at its best, you might want to take a look at Flight 232. It’s the story of a passenger airplane that, as the result of a rare engine problem, ended up losing all of its hydraulics and with it the ability to steer. Somehow, its amazing pilots got the plane to the ground anyway—crashing, but not losing all of their passengers as everybody who knew anything about airplane mechanics believed would happen. Then even more amazing things began to happen as the passengers and the surrounding community mobilized to save as many lives as they could. The most stirring of these stories is the man who ran back into the smoke-filled plane, holding his breath and closing his eyes against the acrid fumes, because he believed he heard a baby crying—a baby who couldn’t have survived the crash—but did. There are other equally touching moments of people caring for each other and doing everything possible to help.
Gonzalez tells the story from a great many POVs which lets him follow the events forward and then constantly step back in time to pick up the thread from another part of the plane or from the people on the ground struggling to find a response to the disaster. It’s a very moving account—really a model for this sort of history.
