Travel with Richard Francis Schaden on his crusade to make air travel safer. The journey will take you from his early days as a naïve young engineer at Boeing, to his training by fire as a novice attorney representing criminal defendants in the Detroit riots, before he even had a chance to take the bar exam, and through his decades long career representing air crash victims and their families. Richard’s tenure at Boeing was short, after he discovered that economics and marketing played a greater role in airplane design than he could as an engineer for the company. Richard describes how the fox often watches the hen house when it comes to aircraft certification and accident reports, with the airplane manufacturers and airlines playing an integral and conflicted role as the partner of the FAA and NTSB. Richard would come to discover that he could do more effective aviation engineering in the courtroom, then he could do within the engineering departments of major aviation manufacturers. This book takes you through Richard’s entertaining engineering and legal career in his decades long effort to force the aviation industry to make air travel safer.

This groundbreaking work of investigative journalism goes behind the scenes at our nation’s airports and penetrates the government to paint a picture of a Transportation Security Administration that is remarkably inept, and reveals the great lengths that U.S. air carriers and their lobbyists have gone in order to make certain that serious airline security has not been instituted in this country. The authors also tell the secret histories of security failures along a continuum that led directly to 9/11: the hijackings of passenger jets to Cuba decades ago, Iran—Contra, Hezbollah’s bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, its hijacking of TWA Flight 847, and the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie tragedy. These dramatic, riveting stories expose lessons from our nation’s history that we still fail to heed. Unsafe at Any Altitude also tells the breathtaking story of the Bush Administration’s efforts to limit the political fallout from 9/11 by scapegoating others.

Offers a behind-the-scenes look at the government's attempts to make flying safer for Americans, revealing how their plans have failed and caused the nation's airports to be even more unsafe than they were before September 11, 2001.

Unsafe at Any Altitude will make you laugh out loud. J.A. Quinn takes us on a life's journey vividly recounting what it is was like traveling through the eyes of a young girl experiencing the joy during the Golden Age of Flying. With her junior stewardess wings pinned on her Sunday dress she dreams of becoming a stewardess, handing out gum to passengers on lumbering propeller driven aircraft. Briefly losing her way, the California girl emerges into a psychedelic fog of the '60s in San Francisco realizing she cannot continue her Deadhead hippie life dancing in Golden Gate Park and decides to follow her young dream. What it takes to make the transition from flower child to a walking and talking Barbie doll is a hilarious story. If you survived airline training, you were expected to be a gracious representative of an airline's marketing department pimping out stewardesses to the mostly male passenger clientele. Somehow, before camera phones, these women found a way to fend for themselves from butt grabbing passengers by accidentally dropping cheesecakes on their heads and getting any witnesses snockered to erase memories of the flight. This story is a riotous testimony of how a stewardesses managed to survive the bumpy but very funny skies.

Account of how and why cars kill, and why the automobile manufacturers have failed to make cars safe.