Transpacific Airlines flight 545 encounters “severe turbulence” in midflight, and makes an emergency landing at Los Angeles with three dead passengers and many more wounded. The reason for the accident is a mystery: the airplane is a Norton Aircraft, a design with an excellent safety record, and the pilot is highly experienced and skilled, ruling out the possibility of human error. Passengers, flight crew, and the pilot all give conflicting accounts of the reason for the disaster, and the most likely explanation turns out to be a technical problem that was fixed years ago.
The accident takes place at the worst possible time: Norton Airlines is on the verge of concluding an eight-billion-dollar sale of N-22 aircraft to the Chinese government. Should the safety record of the N-22 be questioned, the Chinese government might cancel the sale, and Norton, already hit hard by the recession, desperately needs the deal to survive. Then later it found was the son controlling the plane