Synopsis

On March 10, 2019, eight of my colleagues and 149 passengers were killed instantly when their Nairobi-bound flight from Addis Ababa crashed six minutes after takeoff.

As a commercial airline captain for thirty-six years and an instructor/captain at Ethiopian Airlines for more than two years, I wish I could pretend I was shocked and surprised. Truth is, I wasn’t. I knew a crash would happen. In fact, I predicted a crash. I am on record telling my superiors in explicit detail and on numerous occasions that, in its zealous determination to become the biggest passenger carrier on the continent, the company was taking too many safety and maintenance risks. In the wake of the Lion Air crash in October that killed 189, I pleaded with them to take steps to train our pilots on the new MCAS system that had been linked directly to the earlier crash.
No, they answered. They dismissed both my complaints and recommendations. And when they weren’t ignoring me, they were deriding me as a “problem employee” and not a “team player.”

The loss of life was staggering, incomprehensible, and completely unnecessary. People ask me why I am bother with this book. Did I think it will make a difference? The company will just deny it. Yes, they will, I say. And they have.

Then, why? I have 157 reasons. I want the individuals responsible for their deaths to be held accountable. I still have hope that something will change, that someone will listen, and that the crew and passengers killed on Flight 302 will not have lost their lives in vain. A brief ebook, Wasted Warnings: A Whistleblower Tells the Truth About the Fatal Crash of Flight 302, is available, but what the author seeks is a publisher committed to bringing out an expanded, more fully documented full-length book.

Sales arguments

• The two crashes generated major headlines around the world that continue — and will continue — to captivate widespread media attention, but numerous investigations by media and aviation, regulatory, and government panels and agencies into not only giant aerospace companies like Boeing and Ethiopian Airlines, but demands for improved transparency and reform.
• The market for books by corporate whistleblowers is robust.
• We expect our cars to be safe, but what about the planes we board? An average of 9,728 planes carrying 1,270,406 people are in the sky at any given time. In the US, the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO) provides service to more than 44,000 flights and 2.7 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace. A big point of my book is that individual countries don’t own airspace and should not operate airlines as if they do; we all need to be safe and has to be a global issue.
• Currently the Internet features more than 65 million separate articles about the Boeing Max and the crashes, but this is the only book featuring an insider’s story on what really happened.
• The ebook (37,000 words) is complete: what is needed is a publisher committed to bringing an expanded full-length book.

Similar titles

• Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber, by Susan Fowler, 2020
• Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower, Cynthia Cooper, 2008
• Final Destination: Disaster: What Really Happened to Easter Airlines, by George Jehn 2014

Audience

Global air travellersand related employees need more protection and guranteed safety.

Advance praise

"Fast-paced. Technical. Informative. Mind-blowing !! The whole world needs to reads this! Verified Amazon.com Purchase

"Excellent account of the events that lead up to the Ethiopian Airlines crash of Flight #302" Amazon.ca Purchase

"Good job, writing is nice, very nice, I really like the idea of writing and reading." Eduardo Schreiner Aircraft Flight Instructor

"Excellent account of the corruption that affects every day citizens. I thank the whistleblower for taking the risk, to those families that lost someone, now you know the truth! Everyone should buy this book" Rose Ray

"Von Hoesslin submitted records to the U.S. NTSB, which is participating in the probe, but hasn’t been contacted by Ethiopian investigators, he said in an email." Alan Levin, Bloomberg News