\Sample Intro for Explosive Book/

Sample Intro for _________ aviation whistleblower-related book.. Written by myself, a shortlist writer for this project – and here, a strong book-prologue now part of my CV. Names, places, and other identifying words have been removed.

This will not be to everyone's taste (and the constant "blanks" will probably drive many people nuts).

But even with the identifying info removed, it shows my ability to quickly absorb a subject I knew very little about – and to work with information, documents, additional research, and my own ideas, to create (in a few days) a "sample prologue" for a book, about a terrible airplane crash within the last 10 years.

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SAMPLE PROLOGUE FOR BOOK (written from viewpoint of pilot/author).

"This is the story of how _____ people can go hurtling into the sky in a plane, ______Airline Flight____, and lose their lives ____minutes later in a violent crash.

It’s also a story of two men who tried to prevent such a disaster at an airline, who spoke out about it – and found their lives forever changed. And it is an amazingly detailed insider’s look at one air carrier and the aviation industry – both shown to be shockingly negligent about safety and risk.

The elements in this story include: a _______ airplane with a couple of potentially deadly “quirks.” A load of passengers from ____countries, and many of them doing humanitarian work to help change the world. An airline that’s supposed to be the pride of an_______ nation, instead is a travesty. Poor flight training. Faulty maintenance, non-maintenance and a trail of inefficiency and lies. Workers beaten into submission and silence. Sealed records. Breached records. Hundreds of lives destroyed (many of them, our friends and colleagues).

A country where dissenters and doubters can be taken into dirt-floor detention and “disappear.” A country where a $250 million plane sits on a runway, while 10 million people are starving.

This book of tragedy and travesty is written by the two whistleblowers: myself, a Westerner who likely no longer has a career as an aviation captain, and __________, the airline’s former chief engineer, who had to leave everything behind and is in asylum across the ocean. We both found ourselves fighting a corrupt and autocratic airline organization and government, who are hand-in-hand to create the greatest aviation coverup ever.

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The crash site in countryside outside________ showed where over____tons of __________ metal and machinery ploughed into the ground at nearly____miles an hour. Some of the wreckage went ____ feet deep. With it went_____people representing ____nationalities. Half-shredded tires and big twisted chunks of engine parts littered the field with many other items I could barely recognize even as a longtime pilot. It was one big junk heap, this scene of disaster, destruction, ruination. I thought: what happened here is manslaughter, even though there’s not much to be seen.

With the erosion caused by area rain and flooding, though, the earth would bring up some human remains, random body parts, floating in flood water in the crater the airplane had created. That’s just how it is; some things refused to be buried. I had always said, since the _________crash in __________ that “there is going to be another one.” My colleague ___________ had felt the same sense of disaster.

We had both spent months and endless emails trying to convince________ Airline, fire marshals, insurance agencies, the __________ government, regulators – that there would be another disaster with the ________. I had pleaded, in probably hundreds of pages, for more pilot training.

Now we knew _________ was probably going to be sued big time, with class-action law suits being launched all over. Political___________advocate_________was behind one. Not only did______ write a book about_________, but he lost a ___________ on Flight_____. I sense she was a great example of passengers who were heading off on that plane to do some good for the world. There were a lot of people calling for_________’s head. The _______ was now grounded, but for most people that was too little too late.

The focus of the ________ crash investigations was a system on the plane called_______ _______________System, that automatically___________when it is at risk of stalling. My colleague _______ and I were forcing attention beyond that overriding focus of the______ crash investigations. I felt the blame could be laid 25% on ________, 75% on_________Airline.

As we found out, if you put a big plane like this into an airline like________ – where we found so many examples of shoddiness, lack of experience and I-don’t-give-a-sh-t – the worst can happen. Many airplanes have individual tricky mechanisms, and the better equipped you are to handle them – with every detail taken care of – the better it might end. I didn’t see that at __________Airline.

How can one of the few ______ airlines with apparently the required safety standards and clearance to fly to Europe and North America be so lax in its operations? Is it believable that this airline has a US FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) Category 1 safety rating, the organization’s highest? And what of the FAA audit from years ago that found many problems, such as nearly all of the 82 mechanics, inspectors and supervisors whose files were reviewed, lacked the minimum requirements for doing their jobs? Is it bizarre that______ has leading membership in Star Alliance, largest airline alliance in the world, which demands stringent safety protocols?

_________ and I were seeing things that should have had __________’s membership instantly revoked. We were daring to present our concerns and conclusions, warn, speak out, blame if we had to.

Our cultures and backgrounds are very different, though we certainly share airplanes in common. I’m a Westerner, a blunt______-Canadian, a veteran pilot who’s logged almost 7000 hours as a Captain on the ____, and over 2500 hours as an instructor. I’ve lived around the world, including________, and flown over a dozen airlines and charter services: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East. This thing of going after an airline wasn’t new to me. I left one South American carrier after reporting it to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for safety violations on a trip to Miami.

I had come to_______ in_____, thinking I could make this ________ Airline with its horrible accident and incident rate, a safer and better choice for general populace. Wrong! Talk about an uphill struggle that kept stalling. In conclusion I would have failed 50% of the pilots, and made sure 25% of the First Officers to Captain Upgraders never stayed in cockpit. Everywhere, I saw, and reported on, inefficiency at a level that was headed for disaster. I documented it in notes, photographs, emails and videos, hundreds, thousands of items.

Some of the things I found:

* So many unstabilized approaches, no go-around performed by operating crew, late landings, early touchdowns, high g-loadings. ______ online training, cheating on exam questions, doing the work on their own free time, and not fully understanding crucial differences.

* Deliberate dispatching of aircraft without Daily Checks being performed... personally witnessed over 8 hours. Deliberate planning and forced execution of minimum rest for operating crew far below the _________ on a daily basis.

All of the above would have been a massive contributing factor in any potential incident or accident and liability shift for causes and even criminal negligence prosecutions.

* I saw insanely-dangerous practices, like taking the three gear pins for the landing gear and putting them loose into the Equipment Bay unsecured. Many times as a pilot, I refused to depart with these three gear pins not in the cockpit with me. After, I wondered if they were a contributing factor to the stab wheel not able to be operated. I cc’d several________execs about ________ putting those loose, long aluminum pins, in so carelessly. With the oscillation of the plane, those ribbons can get tangled with control wiring or electrical shorting.

* There were also massive tire issues – greatly cracked, rubber peeled off, to show the metal ‘grille’ underneath. I also knew crew were threatened by the Director of Flight Operations. And overall, because I began to speak out about ET safety violations, my own career as an airline pilot is probably permanently grounded.

My colleague__________, who is of an ethnic group targeted by the _______ government, is a dedicated aircraft engineer. After 12 years at it with __________ as their Chief Engineer, he was still rising. However, he was seeing many violations in his own environment, writing emails about them and speaking about them. More and more, _________ had seen some shocking examples of maintenance sloppiness, faulty paperwork and repairs, investigations from parts suppliers pointing to errors including ones leading to cockpit windows shattering in flight; a de-icing mechanism burning, and missing/incorrect wrong bolts on key sensors. That’s just a sample.

In one email sent to________ Airlines Chief Operating Officer_________ in 2017, he wrote: “I personally saw that many task cards are signed without even doing what is written in the instruction. Such violations may even result in a serious safety issue.”

________might have been a good candidate for the Witness Protection Program, but it was risky, and because he’d been followed, and interrogated for a 12-hour stretch, he was just desperate to get out of________ and seek asylum. He, his wife and two children are now in ______USA.

Like me, _______ was sickened by the crash. And not only because of that loss of life. He has said in an interview that on the day after the crash, the ______COO was very upset that the airline could get blamed because of its maintenance “issues” and “violations.” _______ ordered that records on the downed ____ plane be checked for “mistakes’ and said, “We pray to God that this will not point to our fault.”

If the thousands of email warnings both ________and I had sent to airline officials, insurance companies, fire marshalls and other specialists had been acted upon, this outcome might be very different. I know myself that even the kinds of responses we got from ___ personnel added to our frustration. A lot of their emails started with "Greetings!!!" with three exclamation marks. How do you take an airline like this seriously?

My colleague ________ and I are whistleblowers, but we’ve both been called “disgruntled ex-employees” more times than __________has had monsoons. ________ was never demoted, as critics say, and God knows the heights he could have risen to as an engineer if he’d had the chance. Maybe this is to be expected from a country where the _______ has been awarded to a man who gives the order for this aviation coverup. How many disgruntled ex-employees put together thousands of evidence items and emails – or construct a resignation letter of _____ pages – with all the violations and reasons why?

Maybe ____is growing too fast, as _________ has said. It flies ____ million passengers a year. But with all this country’s airline issues, civil disturbances and poverty problems, this land is still beautiful, with its mountains, lowlands and lakes, its cities full of spirit and grit. I’ve loved it as much as any foreigner can; I know many inhabitants, including the workers at the hotels, know about their kids, their military history. _________deserves better than its airline. Not only in __________, the airline industry is full of short-term profits over long-term safety.

There are so many instances, like ValuJet 592 that crashed into the Florida Everglades in 1996. It was “primed for a major crash,” said some sources, and known to want to be “rich” above anything else. In its three years of operations, its pilots made 15 emergency landings in 1994, 57 in 1995, and 59 in the months before the crash in 1996. It had been issued 34 violations by the FAA (yet never been grounded).

In book The Next Crash: How Short Term Profit Seeking Trumps Airline Safety, author Amy Fraher (retired Naval Aviator/former United Airlines pilot) writes of “curious distinctions” in the aviation industry. One of them is that “Regulators operate under the notion that explicit proof of specific intentional violation is required to pursue disciplinary action, and therefore they can ignore the ample evidence provided by whistle-blowers and industry insiders of patterns of reckless and unethical actions that increase risk and often result in catastrophe. It seems an odd distinction when so much is at stake.”

Within the history of air crashes, too, there is plenty of the unexpected, like TWA Flight 800 (in 1996) exploding and breaking up in the air off Long Island NY, or Swissair Flight 111 (in 1998) smashing into the dark Nova Scotia Atlantic from the results of an overheated entertainment system. It’s easier to point the finger of blame at Air France Flight 447 (in 2009), when it fell 12,000 ft. a minute into the ocean northeast of Brazil. Less-experienced flight personnel apparently had mixed up critical actions, while the plane's captain was having his sleep break after a previous night in Rio with his girlfriend. By the time he responded, it was too late.

As a pilot I knew the same kind of crash as _______ was going to happen again. That airline was under investigation for allowing its pilots to fly despite having experienced previous problems. And with Flight _____, the inevitable happens: lawsuits rolling out like a spring flood. ________ and I may not be immune from the action.

The fallout from _________Airline Flight _____crash has propelled _________ and myself, Capt. _________, into media around the world, from ABC to CBC, Bloomberg to BizNews. We are distressed for those _____ passengers and their loved ones, ache for our late colleagues, and are sorry that any visibility we have is due to such a tragedy and disaster.

However, we will continue speaking out, and sharing our extensive findings with the rest of the world. You deserve to know what can happen in uncontrolled and unprofessional airline aviation territory. It’s a matter of flight and death. We also want to acknowledge the many airline workers who have tried to speak out against what they see as safety violations, corruption and carelessness. Those who do so in __________ have often suffered for it.

And we will also give you what we hope is a memorable look at the life of a longtime airline pilot and an aircraft chief engineer, with our voices alternating throughout the book.

We have many visuals, from our specifically-detailed warning emails to airline executives, to airplane and damage visuals – but you can access many more at our website _________."

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(END OF SAMPLE INTRO)

Whether or not the subject matter interests you, I hope this document shows something of my writing and research skills.

It was done quite quickly, but to me indicates what I've always felt is important as a longtime freelance writer: to be able to write about almost anything, with strength, conviction, commitment, and passion – and to do it fast.

Perhaps you have a book or other project in mind. I'd be happy to discuss it! Please DM/PM/connect with me.