This was a sobering yet also fascinating read.

The author's repeated arguments pertaining to safety culture in corporations brought back memories of the tech writing course I took a couple years ago, which in our curriculum, serves almost more as an engineering ethics course than anything else.
While this is not the first book I've read revolving around accident/failure investigations, the centrality of pilots and human reactions in crisis was a new element here.
I think this would be a good follow up to reading books like To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski, which focuses, at least in my memory, more on the purely mechanical aspects of tragedies, but echoes many of the themes regarding the needless deaths caused by corporate penny pinching in pursuit of ever more profit.

I have a few minor criticisms; I thought the book got a touch redundant at times, and could have benefited from a bit of more stringent editing.
The ebook file I read also contained a multitude of type errors, however I'm assuming these were mostly unique to the ebook ARC.
I also did not appreciate the one transphobic remark somewhere around halfway through the book.
I would encourage the author and publisher to omit this line in further editions, as it was ugly stain on an otherwise wonderful work.

I am not sure how to rate some of the technical explanations. I thought they were largely adequate, clear, and concise... but while I have no flying experience, I have completed all but a few hours of an aerospace engineering degree, and am familiar with a fair bit of flight performance calculations.
It did occur to me that a few diagrams illustrating things like rate of climb and phases of take off would be helpful to readers not already familiar with these. The diagrams that -were- included were very useful.
I will say I very much enjoyed having the pictures of relevant aircraft at the back of the book.

Overall, I still give it a 5/5 and I think reading works like this will at least in some way help me to be a better engineer once I'm working in the industry.
I hope we can make some headway in getting these recommended actions taken by regulators in the wake of the 737 MAX disasters.

There are many books about the airline industry. This one is one of the better ones, written by an experienced airline pilot. This is much more than a collection of stories. It provides an in-depth analysis and commentary on why airliners crash - usually due to human error.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it has to be said. Very interesting account of the factors that make up airline crashes, broken down.

I work in the healthcare industry myself, but I could relate to so much that this author was talking about - the culture of shame if you admit to being tired or at the edge of burn out, the factors that go together to create the perfect storm and leads to lost lives, being pushed to accept things that you really shouldn't etc etc. I have been considering doing a Masters on the culture within our industry and the author of this book certainly gave me even more food for thought and things to consider that I had not thought of.

Excellent piece of writing, engaging and interesting, even for those of us who are not pilots or otherwise working in the airline industry.

5 stars from me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pen & Sword.

I am a big aviation buff and this book is right up my alley of interest. Aviation accidents, thankfully are very rare occurrences, but are unusually fascinating because of the cascading set that circumstances that lead to some awful endings.

This book, written by an experienced pilot, provides a number of examples of how a number of different facts line up (love the cheese example) to create the conditions for problems. These problems can be scheduling issues and pilot fatigue, cultural issues with the pilots, airline culture, a disregard for safety, or a disregard for following procedures, just to name a few examples.

Fortunately, it is exceedingly rare that these issues line up, but the author provides a really well-written account of a number of these occasions. I was squirming (at least in my head) to read through as step after step is disregarded and we know what is coming. Disaster.

I found this book to be easily digested by non-pilots, bit clearly being a pilot or aviation buff is going to be more understanding of the circumstances discussed here. I like that the author interweaves personal accounts to make his point, but I wish there was a better introduction to understand the author’s credentials. After all, I could only guess at his experience, and the type of aircraft he was flying in his personal accounts. Though the book has a number of excellent photographs, I couldn’t figure out what he was flying.

A thoroughly enjoyable book that is fortunately not macabre, but rather points out the facts of the accidents and is worth reading. Also, a good reminder of why things are done in a particular way is a good way to account for safety in doing tasks.

A interesting good read that should widely appeal to aviation buffs.

This is a very honest and frank review of airline accidents peppered with anecdotes from the Author's own experiences. Some of the incidents are well known others less so but in each case Tozer has used the official investigation reports to both tell what happened and what the investigation found were the root causes. To this he adds his own perspective which is less guarded than the official comments and seem to follow common themes based no doubt on a lifetime in the industry. One of these is company culture, specifically where profit gets prioritised ahead of safety. As someone who has worked in Process Safety in the Oil and Gas business this is exactly the same challenge we faced. Ironically, we always looked with envy at the airline industry's levels of safety which were and still are much better than our own! This fact is difficult to remember when reading this book despite Tozer's insistence that the highest risk he faces in a working day is driving to and from the airport. Compared to the number of flights and hours flown globally every day, accidents are very rare but of course when you read a book like this dozens are listed one after the other and it is difficult to keep a perspective. What impressed me was some of the processes instilled in the industry to drive a safe outcome, such as the adherence to safe operating procedures reinforced with checklists and the Cockpit Resource Management dealing with distributed responsibility, clear accountability and communication.
The book is an easy read and even if you know nothing about airlines and flying you will be able to appreciate the content and know more when you next board a plane - provided you have not been scared off!
Thanks to Netgalley and Pen and Sword for allowing me to review this prepublication copy.

This book explains the numerous safety measures of airlines, and also how things can go very wrong. I have even more respect for pilots, and I agree that further safety measures should be taken (such as schedules that don't produce fatigue in pilots).

What a fascinating read. Pretty sure I didn't put this down once I picked it up, which is rare when it comes to non-fiction

How do you know if the airline you are planning to fly with is safe? What should you be worried about? Is it, Turbulence, lightning or that the pilots might be asleep while the aircraft flies on, on autopilot? This and many topics are discussed in this amazing book. Loved reading this fascinating book!