Airframe

Airframe is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, his eleventh under his own name and twenty-first overall. It was first published in 1996 in hardcover by Knopf and in paperback in 1997 by Ballantine Books.

The plot follows Casey Singleton, a quality assurance vice president at Norton Aircraft, as she investigates an in-flight accident aboard a Norton-manufactured airliner that killed three passengers and injured fifty-six. Because the manufacturer's reputation depends on the outcome, the investigation is conducted under commercial and public pressure rather than in a laboratory.

Airframe is one of the few Crichton novels not to be adapted for film, which he attributed to the expense such a production would require. Crichton builds the book as an investigation rather than a thriller: the evidence is a flight recorder, a maintenance history and a manufacturing process, and the pressure comes from a television news crew and a company that would rather the question went away. The novel spends its length on how airliners are certified and how little passengers know about the machinery they trust, which is the same documentary instinct behind Crichton's earlier technical novels.