Destination Unknown Essay, Research Paper

Destination unknown Star Dust Falling Jay Rayner 329pp, Doubleday A plane clang has its ain curious horror: no affair that slow drowning in an icy sea would be far worse than sudden immolation in a mid-air detonation, none of us board a ship with the same subconscious fright that accompanies us on to an airliner. Partly it is the abruptness, and partially that there are improbable to be any remains for a dignified farewell. That Jay Rayner has written a whole book about the destiny of an airliner that vanished over the Andes in 1947 en path to Santiago in Chile is, you might state, testament to the morbid captivation of plane clangs. In fact, & # 8220 ; one of the greatest air power enigmas of all clip & # 8221 ; , in Rayner & # 8217 ; s instead hyped claim, was merely singular because it was 50 old ages before the wreckage of the Star Dust was discovered, high up in inhospitable mountains. Star Dust Falling fleshes out the narrative thoroughly, if a small tenaciously: the lives of each of the riders and the history of the air hose, the ephemeral British South American Airways. Ironically, the brilliant but irregular air power innovator who founded it, Don Bennett, had written the standard work on air pilotage, every bit good as establishing Bomber Command & # 8217 ; s elect Pathfinder unit, which marked bombing marks over Germany during the war. More redundantly, it besides inside informations the squabbling within the Argentine military that marred the operation to retrieve the plane & # 8217 ; s wreckage, and even the generation of the Hoagy Carmichael vocal that gave the trade its name. Rayner navigates his two narrations & # 8211 ; the last hours of the doomed airliner, and the effects of a climber & # 8217 ; s opportunity find of a Rolls-Royce engine cowling half a century on & # 8211 ; with an easy eloquence. Paradoxically, his painstaking research finally demystifies the narrative, to the extent that you wonder if there truly was a whole book in it. He establishes that there wasn & # 8217 ; t any gilded aboard the Star Dust & # 8211 ; a narrative in itself, since in those yearss the British authorities on a regular basis sent bullion around the universe on British airliners ( the captains of

BOAC flying boats had to disperse the bars carefully under every seat to avoid unbalancing their craft). When a plane went down, it was a genuine governmental emergency to get a salvage team out in time to stop the gold being hauled away in local farmers’ carts. Rayner’s fruitless diggings also establish that the official files carried by one passenger, the King’s Messenger, were not valuable diplomatic secrets that might have invited sabotage, but so routine as to have been weeded from the archives almost immediately. The book’s wider thesis is that the demise of the Star Dust was symptomatic of the disastrously dysfunctional culture of British South American Airways, in which the wing-and-a-prayer attitudes of its flying crew, largely Bomber Command veterans, were quite inappropriately translated into the running of a civil airline flying some very long and difficult transcontinental routes. But though the airline’s safety record was hardly admirable, the ramshackle picture Rayner paints is much more representative of civil aviation at the time than he seems aware. After the war, the airliners available were largely converted bombers, and there was little time for the exhaustive testing of new prototypes that we would expect today. Until the jet engine was commercially available, all airliners were simply underpowered; there were, by today’s standards, lots of crashes. Nowadays, Imperial Airways’ Empire flying boats are remembered as halcyon legend, yet in its first year of operation the airline lost six of them. Moreover, Rayner’s research contradicts his case: the official verdict of the Argentine air accident investigators is that jet streams – high-altitude winds whose very existence was then imperfectly understood by meteorologists – retarded the plane’s passage over the Andes, so that it began its descent before it had cleared them. Weather was a hugely significant factor for all planes at the time. It was no mean feat for airliners such as the Star Dust to make it successfully across the Andes at all. Graham Coster is the author of Corsairville: The Lost Domain of the Flying Boat (Penguin).