Mayday 747

A Boeing 747 takes off carrying hundreds of passengers, a large quantity of aviation fuel and the widely shared assumption that everybody will eventually arrive where the ticket says. Then a catastrophe strikes in mid-air, and the aircraft becomes the centre of an escalating emergency in which pilots, passengers and people on the ground must find a solution before gravity supplies its own.

Allan Scott’s Mayday 747 belongs to the splendid era of disaster fiction when modern technology was admired chiefly for the spectacular variety of ways in which it might fail. The jumbo jet represented the glamorous future of international travel: enormous, sophisticated and capable of transporting an entire small community through the sky while dinner was served. It also represented an unusually efficient method of placing that community in danger all at once.

As the crisis unfolds, professional calm competes with understandable panic. The crew must assess the damage, maintain control and communicate with experts below, while the passengers confront the awkward possibility that the safety demonstration may have been more relevant than it initially appeared. On the ground, officials and specialists work urgently through the available options, including several that would ordinarily be rejected before the end of the sentence describing them.

Published in 1972, when the 747 was still a striking symbol of technological ambition, the novel captures both the excitement and anxiety surrounding the new age of mass air travel. This is aviation before online check-in, budget baggage fees and passengers filming every inconvenience for social media. The danger is satisfyingly physical, the machinery impressively large and nobody imagines that switching the aircraft off and on again will solve the problem.

Fast-moving and enjoyably tense, Mayday 747 is ideal for readers of vintage disaster thrillers, aviation fiction and stories in which a collection of strangers must suddenly display courage, ingenuity and an unexpected knowledge of emergency procedures. It may be less suitable for nervous flyers, particularly those intending to read during take-off or whenever the cabin lights flicker.

This Sphere edition is in Good condition. It has made it safely through more than fifty years with no serious structural failure, uncontrolled descent or requirement for assistance from air-traffic control. Any normal signs of previous handling merely confirm that earlier passengers reached the final page alive.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where all departures are subject to availability, turbulence is kept to a minimum and every book is expected to land on your doormat in approximately the same shape in which it left us.

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