Star Dust Falling: The Story of the Plane That Vanished

by Jay Rayner

Star Dust Falling Rayner, Jay

Genres: Nonfiction

329 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2002

About the author

Jay Rayner is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster born in 1966.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have for years been fascinated by disasters, most notably the Titanic is my #1 fixation, but occasionally I spread my wings and read other books about disasters. Sometimes these are ones that I have seen a film/documentary based on, or like this one, that I have never heard of before, until the cover/title caught my eye in a charity shop.

I thought this would be a fascinating look into a mysterious plane crash from 1947. Instead what I got was a very back and forth, heavily padded story, which you don't learn anything new from. There's no insight into why the plane crashed, or what the final "STENDEC" morse code message would mean. (The author has listed some passable examples of what it could mean and some completely silly ones.) It just seems to be a book laden down with rumours and what ifs. I know there's probably not much that can be told about it now, as a lot of the relatives of the people on the plane will have since passed. I am even reading this 20 years on from the publication and it just felt ill-thought out at times.

There was way too much focus on other "Star" planes, and how they ran and incomplete biographies of the passengers and crew. The passengers and crew biographies seem shoehorned in as a last minute addition, because ideally to me, they should have been at the beginning. They also seemed to run into each other, and I struggled to differentiate from each person. Perhaps it was the way the author was writing it, but I found it difficult to get much enthusiasm going for this.

There also seems to be heavy reliance on padding the book out with other subjects that don't matter. The war. Politics. Who found the plane wreckage first. The Don Bennett sections could have been a biography themselves, without detracting from the storyline about the Star Dust. But it seemed to be that the story of Star Dust wouldn't have covered more than a couple of chapters.

The whole back and forth irritated me as well. Normally I can handle books that flip back and forth in time, but the telling of this, seemed to keep the reader away from the main reason they'd picked up the book - to find out more about Star Dust.

I suppose much like another famous disappearance from a similar time, Amelia Earhart, we'll never truly know what happened. I guess much like Everest etc, the bodies/plane wreckage are still up there. The book just ends, talking about a leather wallet being found near the wreckage, and then we move onto the bibliography. I did expect that I wasn't going to get a satisfactory ending, or all the wreckage has been taken away and all the bodies have been identified, but at the same time, I did feel slightly cheated after wading through 250 pages. It is quite possibly that the author just run out of stuff to pad out the book with.

This was a thoroughly disappointing telling of what should be a more well known disaster, and I doubt I would recommend this book, or keep it on my shelf. Perhaps I was just the wrong audience for this and didn't have enough general knowledge about planes, but I think the author could have condensed this down quite significantly, and held my interest in Star Dust more.

[Rikki Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I read it when it first came out in 2002 (I think) It grabbed my attention from the first page. I love to climb and I could imagine how the climbers who found the first evidence must have felt. I loved the research, the detail of the recovery, The politics and conspiricys about who and what was on board given it was post war.

But most of all It had an affect on me that I am sure was not the authors intention.

I was so taken by the description of the particular area of the Andes and in particular the remoteness, poor weather and difficulty of the dead volcano, Aconcagua, that within one month I had planned my trip to go climb it. And I did.. Happy days:))

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been interested in reading more about the early days of aviation after reading about Charles Lindburgh in Bill Bryson's One Summer. This account was a perfect follow on as it was about an early British airline run by ex WWII pilots. I hate flying, and have the fear of flying course diploma to prove it, but I have an equal fascination with aviation and am drawn to aviation disaster books. How anybody got on a plane back in the 40s beats me - it was noisy, small, cold, arduous and risky. You had to use an oxygen tube to breath at altitude, the pilots got yesterday's weather report before taking off, and hadn't heard of jetstreams. Liked this book for the account also of the climbers who discovered the wreck. Interesting stuff.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fabulous insight into one man's ambition and dangerous self belief in the world of aviation. this book has everything - real life characters that could have jumped out of a crime/mystery novel, the birth of heathrow, natural phenomenon, a brief history of the pathfinders in WWII. it is non-fiction, true story, fact. but reads just like a novel.

[Christine Negroni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jay Rayner has done a wonderful job telling the story of an airliner that went missing on a trans-continental flight across South America in 1947. With Malaysia 370 in the news, Star Dust Falling, written more than a decade ago, is not only timely again, it is a reminder that in aviation, there is no such thing as a new accident.

What makes Star Dust Falling worth every minute you will spend reading it, are the intriguing stories of the airline and the government charged with overseeing it, the pilots and the passengers and the professionals and the amateurs who set out to find the plane in the high mountains of Argentina years later.

Fascinating on every level, perfectly structured and wonderfully written, Star Dust Falling is a must-read.