When Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed into Karen Wielinski's home, everyone aboard the plane died. So did "one on the ground." This compelling memoir tells of survival, grief, hope, miracles, and family bonds. It is a moving tribute to Doug Wielinski and the other victims whose families melded into a movement for airline safety.

Buffalo, New York : Librastream, [2017]

Up-To-Date Coverage of Every Aspect of Commercial Aviation Safety Completely revised edition to fully align with current U.S. and international regulations, this hands-on resource clearly explains the principles and practices of commercial aviation safety—from accident investigations to Safety Management Systems. Commercial Aviation Safety, Sixth Edition, delivers authoritative information on today's risk management on the ground and in the air. The book offers the latest procedures, flight technologies, and accident statistics. You will learn about new and evolving challenges, such as lasers, drones (unmanned aerial vehicles), cyberattacks, aircraft icing, and software bugs. Chapter outlines, review questions, and real-world incident examples are featured throughout. Coverage includes: • ICAO, FAA, EPA, TSA, and OSHA regulations • NTSB and ICAO accident investigation processes • Recording and reporting of safety data • U.S. and international aviation accident statistics • Accident causation models • The Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) • Crew Resource Management (CRM) and Threat and Error Management (TEM) • Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) and Flight Data Monitoring (FDM) • Aircraft and air traffic control technologies and safety systems • Airport safety, including runway incursions • Aviation security, including the threats of intentional harm and terrorism • International and U.S. Aviation Safety Management Systems

QF32 is the award winning bestseller from Richard de Crespigny, author of the forthcoming Fly!: Life Lessons from the Cockpit of QF32 On 4 November 2010, a flight from Singapore to Sydney came within a knife edge of being one of the world's worst air disasters. Shortly after leaving Changi Airport, an explosion shattered Engine 2 of Qantas flight QF32 - an Airbus A380, the largest and most advanced passenger plane ever built. Hundreds of pieces of shrapnel ripped through the wing and fuselage, creating chaos as vital flight systems and back-ups were destroyed or degraded. In other hands, the plane might have been lost with all 469 people on board, but a supremely experienced flight crew, led by Captain Richard de Crespigny, managed to land the crippled aircraft and safely disembark the passengers after hours of nerve-racking effort. Tracing Richard's life and career up until that fateful flight, QF32 shows exactly what goes into the making of a top-level airline pilot, and the extraordinary skills and training needed to keep us safe in the air. Fascinating in its detail and vividly compelling in its narrative, QF32 is the riveting, blow-by-blow story of just what happens when things go badly wrong in the air, told by the captain himself. Winner of ABIA Awards for Best General Non-fiction Book of the Year 2013 and Indie Awards' Best Non-fiction 2012 Shortlisted ABIA Awards' Book of the Year 2013

Writing became a cathartic experience for Karen Wielinski as a means to process a devastating tragedy. Her first book, "One on the Ground", told compelling story of how her world was changed forever when Continental Flight 3407 crashed into her home taking 51 souls with it. This book, "Pieces of My Puzzle", flows naturally from "One on the Ground". It explores Karen's life journey through the '50s, '60s, 70s and beyond. The Wielinskis were a family of puzzlers. Her husband, Doug, was probably working on a puzzle in another room when a commercial airliner crashed into their house and exploded into flame. Doug died in that crash. Miraculously, Karen and her youngest daughter who were home that night managed to escape. "Pieces of My Puzzle" gives insight into Buffalo and Western New York history through her unique perspective. These are stories of a small child growing up on the East Side, where she was surrounded by a large extended family and a community that found its nucleus in St. Mary of Sorrows Parish. The five senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing and smell play an important role in developing Karen's puzzle. She blends a mix of 250 photos, a few original poems, a series of essays, and even a selection of family recipes. Karen believes that these essays, photos, poems, and recipes demonstrate the way she has discovered, cultivated, lost, and rearranged her puzzle pieces throughout the years. They are held together by faith, trust, wonder, and, most of all, love. She takes comfort from her experiences, and looks forward to adding to her life puzzle.--Publisher.

When a family outing in a private plane takes a tragic turn, a Memorial Day trip becomes an unforgettable 15 hours of danger, rescue efforts, and miracles. On a clear Saturday morning, professional fire captain and private pilot Brian Brown, his wife, and younger daughter headed out in their Cessna Sky Hawk for a weekend with their elder daughter. But unexpected severe conditions send the craft into the treacherous War Eagle Idaho mountainside...a remote place that would make communication and rescue nearly impossible—if they survived. This captivating story, featured on The Today Show, is about a family in crisis, emergency plans for survival, and the incredible orchestration of local, state, and national rescue workers who brave unpredictable obstacles to accomplish the unimaginable. An intriguing account of faith and courage reminds readers that one’s darkest hour can become the landscape for miracles to unfold.

A Family Torn Apart is a heart-wrenching true story of an eleven-year-old boy seeing and experiencing his family being torn apart. The mother and father had four children, all of them boys. The family definitely had its ups and downs. The parents separated in 1954, and three of the boys were sent to foster homes. The youngest boy lived with his mother. The family reunited in 1958, and lived for four years on a farm in Montezuma, Kansas. After a horrible accident, the family spiraled downward into poverty. They got evicted from their home and moved to Ohio for a new start. This is the story of a new start that quickly ends with the family struggling with alcoholism, abuse, abandonment, and poverty. It also tells about the wild stunts and pranks the children have pulled. Some of the stunts and pranks are humorous and will have you chuckling, while others end sadly and will have you cringing from the pain and suffering the boys endure. This is a true story seen through the eyes of the youngest child. He is eleven years old when he sees his family start to be torn apart.

On Christmas Eve 1971, the packed LANSA flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa was struck by lightning and went down in dense jungle hundreds of miles from civilization. Of its 93 passengers, only one survived. Juliane Koepcke, the seventeen-year-old child of famous German zoologists. She'd been thrown from the plane two miles above the forest canopy, but had sustained only a broken collarbone and a cut on her leg. With incredible courage, instinct and ingenuity, she survived three weeks in the "green hell" of the Amazon - using the skills she'd learned in assisting her parents on their research trips into the jungle - before coming across a loggers hut, and, with it, safety. Now she tells her fascinating story for the first time, and in doing so tells us about her 'Gerald Durrell' childhood - with a menagerie of wild, exotic and sometimes dangerous pets - about how she learned to survive at her parents ecological station deep in the rainforest and about her present-day commitment to this wildlife as a biologist and dedicated environmentalist.

When United Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the gash it left in the ground became a national site of mourning. The flight’s 40 passengers became a media obsession, and countless books, movies, and articles told the tale of their heroic fight to band together and sacrifice their lives to stop Flight 93 from becoming a weapon of terror. In Angel Patriots, Alexander Riley argues that by memorializing these individuals as patriots, we have woven them into much larger story of our nation—an existing web of narratives, values, dramatic frameworks, and cultural characters about what it means to be truly American. Riley examines the symbolic impact and role of the Flight 93 disaster in the nation’s collective consciousness, delving into the spontaneous memorial efforts that blossomed in Shanksville immediately after the news of the crash spread; the ad-hoc sites honoring the victims that in time emerged, such as a Parks Department-maintained memorial close to the crash site and a Flight 93 Chapel created by a local Catholic priest; and finally, the creation of an official, permanent crash monument in Shanksville like those built for past American wars. Riley also analyzes the cultural narratives that evolved in films and in books around the events on the day of the crash and the lives and deaths of its “angel patriot” passengers, uncovering how these representations of the event reflect the myth of the authentic American nation—one that Americans believed was gravely threatened in the September 11 attacks. A profound and thought-provoking study, Angel Patriots unveils how, in the wake of 9/11, America mourned much more than the loss of life.

“Surviving is a true blessing that few get to experience.” Being strapped in the seat of a plane as it plunges into a nosedive midair is everyone’s worst nightmare. Bracing for Impact’s compilers and contributors know. They have both lived out that fear and survived, albeit badly hurt, in their own plane crashes. In this collection of true-life survivor tales, people from all walks of life—a freelance writer, a crew member of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band, a naval flight surgeon, a teenager, and a newlywed on her honeymoon, among others—recount their traumatic narrow escapes as engines stalled, fuel ran out, hazardous weather conditions descended, and landings did not go according to plan. In the face of death, as life flashed before their eyes—or not, as some wryly note—these survivors encountered the terrific split of before and after the crash. Their lives, though preserved, would change forever. Perhaps more significant than the crash itself is how each story plays out in the aftermath of the ordeal. In heart-wrenching, unrelenting honesty, these stories explore the wide spectrum of impacts on survivors—ranging from debilitating fear, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse, to a renewed sense of urgency, where survivors swear to live each day to the fullest and rededicate their lives to helping others. Including the 1977 story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash that killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and vocalist Cassie Gaines, Bracing for Impact is as much a horrific account of air disasters as it is a celebration and recognition of the people who survived them. Fans of the 2016 Clint Eastwood film Sully starring Tom Hanks will enjoy this edge-of-your-seat read!