20 TRUE STORIES OF PILOTS WHO SAVED THEIR PLANES

A plane can lose one engine and keep flying. Lose its hydraulics, its instruments, part of its fuselage, or every engine it has, and it should be a very different story.

Yet twenty times in this book, crews found a way to bring the aircraft home.
20 True Stories of Pilots Who Saved Their Planes recounts flights that, on paper, looked doomed. A DC-9 gliding over Manitoba with both engines dead. A DC-10 controlled with engine thrust alone after the complete loss of its hydraulic flight controls. An Airbus forced onto the Hudson River just 208 seconds after disaster struck. An Electra whose crew had to discover, in real time, how to control a crippled aircraft with whatever still worked.

Twenty crews. Twenty extreme emergencies. One question every time:
What is left, and what can you do with it?
Inside this book:

• Twenty flights reconstructed from official investigation reports, including NTSB, BEA, AAIB and other aviation authorities, cross-checked whenever possible against firsthand crew accounts.
• Some of aviation's most famous survival stories, including the Gimli Glider, United 232 at Sioux City and US Airways 1549 on the Hudson, alongside remarkable cases far less familiar to the general public, such as Reeve Aleutian Flight 8.
• Cabin crews as well as pilots, including the people preparing passengers for impact while those in the cockpit are still trying to work out how to keep the aircraft flying.
• A precise reconstruction of each save: the decisions, improvisations, technical constraints and critical seconds that made the difference.

This is what happens when the checklist is no longer enough, the aircraft no longer behaves the way it should, and a crew has to invent a way home with whatever still works.