The Excalibur Disaster Author:Jack M. Bickham Transwestern Flight 161, en route from St. Louis to New York, was an Excalibur jet, a magnificent craft with a radical wing design that made for unprecedented handling and performance. Excalibur was new in commercial service, and already people called it the airplane of the future. — But Flight 161 never made it to New York. It crashed on approac... more »h to JKK, with 199 passengers and crew aboard. None of them survived. And the crash was a total mystery. Wind sheer, pilot error, sabotage -- nothing checked out. The real answers lay in a smoking heap of twisted metal, and mangled flesh.
So begins a frantic, far-ranging, unrelenting investigation that would shake the aviation industry to its foundations -- and change the lives of everyone connected with Excalibur. All of them had to know why Flight 161 went down. Because Excalibur was still flying -- and somewhere in its miles of cable, its intricate metal structure, its super-sophisticated controls, was perhaps a flaw... a tiny elusive flaw that had killed nearly two hundred people. And there was no way of knowing when it might strike again.« less