AIRFRAME

By Michael Crichton Knopf; 352 pages; $26

It's easy to criticize Michael Crichton, the physician who wrote the first big science-versus- technology thriller (" The Andromeda Strain") and went on to bigger and sillier sanitized horror fiction with "Congo," "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World."

A one-man entertainment industry whose novels are launched with a whopping 2 million-copy first printing, Crichton is also executive producer of "ER," the nation's No. 1 TV show.

Although some readers have protested his alleged anti-Asian bias in "Rising Sun" and anti-woman bias in "Disclosure," a new Crichton novel is always an occasion for excitement: Preachy, showoffish, cartoonlike and manipulative it may be, but read two pages and you can't put it down. And "Airframe" is classic Crichton.

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TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS

A crack researcher who's notorious for immersing himself in the technical nuts and bolts, Crichton is also a stickler for controversy -- the more political the better -- and doesn't mind making enemies for the sake of a good story.

It seems a good bet that Crichton won't be interviewed by the likes of Mike Wallace or Diane Sawyer, for example, because the issue in "Airframe" is not really the safety of airplanes but the danger of TV "news" programs very much like "60 Minutes" and "PrimeTime Live."

According to one sympathetically drawn character, "television people" who produce shows like "Newsline" (Crichton's fictional TV news magazine) are "beneath pond scum on the evolutionary scale." Before Crichton is done with them, we believe it.

THE CASE OF FLIGHT 545

The book opens with one of those in-flight "incidents" that will send even veteran fliers running for cover: In the middle of Flight 545 from Hong Kong to Denver, the wide-body aircraft suddenly falls into a steep dive in which "it felt like the plane was going straight down," then just as suddenly flattens passengers in their seats by going straight up.

"Stall! Stall!" says a metallic voice from the cockpit as "buzzing, insistent alarms" are heard overhead, and the plane porpoises so violently that everything not bolted or belted down hurtles about the cabin. "An elderly Chinese woman slid down the aisle on her back, screaming. A teenage boy followed, tumbling head over heels. . . . Yellow oxygen masks were dropping. . . . Shoes and purses ricocheted across the cabin, clanging and banging; bodies thumped against the seats, the floor."

Crichton is at his best setting up this kind of horrendous scene and then cutting away before we know what hit us. Here he switches to the control tower at Los Angeles International Airport, where flight controllers are perplexed to hear a surprisingly calm Captain Chang request "30 or 40 ambulances" for what he blithely calls "a passenger emergency" in which two are dead but the plane has sustained "minor damage only."

Switch again to the Federal Aviation Administration's Flight Standards District Office at LAX, where Crichton takes his first shot at the problems facing airplane safety regulators -- congressional cutbacks in FAA and National Transportation Safety Board budgets -- while describing a system of admirable checks and balances created by the plane's manufacturer, a company very much like Boeing or McDonnell Douglas that Crichton calls Norton Aircraft.

Here we see an extremely knowledgeable Incident Review Team meet to figure out what went wrong with the Norton-built N-22 during Flight 545. Central to the team is its QA (quality assurance) liaison, Casey Singleton, a tough-minded "born peacemaker" who's as popular with the guys on the "radio rack" and "major join" assembly-line stations as she is with Norton's president.

CARDBOARD CHARACTERS

More nerd than novelist, Crichton has trouble developing three- dimensional characters, so Casey's troubles at home -- as a single mother with an unemployed, alcoholic ex-husband -- seem to have been thrown in to satisfy Julia Roberts when she asks for character motivation in the movie version. What keeps readers compulsively turning these pages is the painless way Crichton teaches us about airplanes. Despite deep cutbacks in Norton's workforce -- and union reprisals that will endanger Casey -- Crichton convinces us that complex, built-in safety systems in the airline industry really are trustworthy and that company investigations do work.

However, something is mysteri ously askew as Casey's team dismantles the plane with tweezer- like attention to detail: Counterfeit parts from overseas turn up; the cockpit voice recorder is useless; readings from the flight data recorder, or "black box," take days to interpret; the thrust reversers appear suspect; the pilot can't be found; and although an "uncommanded slats deploy" in the N-22's wings might be the key, the investigative team knows that the autopilot would have corrected it.

BUILDING SUSPENSE

Time is of the essence in all Crichton novels, and here the suspense builds predictably (and effectively) as the investigation enters an unprecedented time crunch: On the one hand, a crucial sale of Norton airplanes to China may be lost if the N-22 looks unsafe; on the other, TV shows like "Newsline" have obtained passengers' videotapes in which flying bodies and wild noises make the N-22 look and sound like a death trap.

Crichton shamelessly emphasizes the fast pace by limiting his chapters to two and three pages, which means scene after scene stops for no reason and picks up again on the next page. We forgive this nuisance when he takes us inside TV shows like "Newsline," where the producers have the power and stars like Marty Reardon (read: Mike Wallace) "flew in for a single day, did the stand-ups and the major interviews, and then flew on to the next shoot."

Jennifer Malone, the bratty, gifted producer of "Newsline's" Norton story, is a classic Crichton stereotype: She represents a villainous industry and has little or no personality of her own. She doesn't want to know the history or details of airplane manufacture "because context meant referring to the past" and she "understood that gripping television was now." In the Norton segment, "the way to frame the piece, she said, was Rot Beneath the Surface" -- a story of yet another big company with slick PR trying to lie to the public. All complexity is lost for the sake of each "media moment."

We think things have reached a climax when Casey faces Reardon under the hot lights on "Newsline," but hold on to your seats -- Crichton may be obvious, but he does save a few twists that leave us surprised, satisfied and even a bit better informed at the end.