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Flight 232
- A Story of Disaster and Survival
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
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Flight 232
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Summary
Twenty-five years after the catastrophe, a dramatic and extraordinarily rare 360-degree view of the crash of a fully loaded jumbo jet.
As hundreds of rescue workers waited on the ground, United Airlines Flight 232 wallowed drunkenly over the bluffs northwest of Sioux City. The plane slammed onto the runway and burst into a vast fireball. The rescuers didn't move at first: nobody could possibly survive that crash. And then people began emerging from the summer corn that lined the runways. Miraculously, 184 of 296 passengers lived. No one has ever attempted the complete reconstruction of a crash of this magnitude. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, crew, and airport and rescue personnel, Laurence Gonzales, a commercial pilot himself, captures, minute-by-minute, the harrowing journey of pilots flying a plane with no controls and flight attendants keeping their calm in the face of certain death. He plumbs the hearts and minds of passengers as they pray, bargain with God, plot their strategies for survival, and sacrifice themselves to save others.
Ultimately he takes us, step-by-step, through the gripping scientific detective work in super-secret labs to dive into the heart of a flaw smaller than a grain of rice that shows what brought the aircraft down. An unforgettable drama of the triumph of heroism over tragedy and human ingenuity over technological breakdown, Flight 232 is a masterpiece in the tradition of the greatest aviation stories ever told.
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What listeners say about Flight 232
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Jetstream1981
- 22-10-23
Informative but disjointed
I came at this with some knowledge of the disaster, but the level of detail about the crash this added was top notch and clearly the author knows and cares about the subject.
The problem with the book is the structure (or lack of). While perhaps unimaginative this could really have down with being told in some sort of order. With all the different people involved in the crash that are talked about it’s hard to remember who is who (with the exception of maybe a couple of the more memorable people).
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- chris cleeter
- 27-03-17
Too Much Unecessary Detail
What did you like best about Flight 232? What did you like least?
I struggled to get past the first 30 mins. Of course it can add colour to the story by including some personal details of the passengers but not to the extent of , where their sons and daughters went to college and who their friends were , blah blah blah .Tedious
Was Flight 232 worth the listening time?
no
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Anders O.
- 11-01-24
Great book, bad narrating.
This is a very nice and detailed account of the Flight 232 crash. The book is somewhat graphic on occasion, but not gory or to anything that borders exploitation.
The narrating Howe et, is poorly voiced and massively over-dramatic. At the very least, the narrator should have listened to the actual CVR and watched interviews with the key survivors. In shourt, the narrating of the pilots and ATC sounds absolutely ridiculous.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Suzy
- 02-12-17
Scholarly overview of a disaster
This is an interesting book, in that I discovered a lot about the accident, the people and the investigation into a plane crash. However the structure of the book limits the dramatic arc because you find out the fate of each person almost as soon as the person is introduced. By doing this we get to hear about the experience in that person's own words (or those of a relative/colleague)vehicle is positive. But it does mean that we go over the crash again and again as each person tells their story. There are also a lot of people's stories so it became tricky to keep track of them all. The narrator was great, with a serious tone befitting the subject matter, without sounding dull or monotonous. Overall worth a listen to hear these survivor stories but I do wonder if a different structure might have worked better.
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