A Thriller Not to Carry On Your Next Plane Trip

AIRFRAME

By Michael Crichton

352 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.

A wide-body passenger jet, TransPacific Airlines Flight 545, en route from Hong Kong to Denver, suddenly goes through a violent series of steep dives and climbs. The pilot requests priority clearance for emergency landing at Los Angeles. His plane is minimally damaged, but passengers have been injured, some fatally, and he may need as many as 40 ambulances.

At home in nearby Glendale, Casey Singleton is explaining to her 7-year-old daughter that her position at Norton Aircraft is now ''Quality Assurance rep on the Incident Review Team,'' which means she checks the planes after they leave the plant. Casey's beeper squeals, calling her to an emergency team meeting, where she learns not only of the incident involving the airliner, which Norton built, but also of the possible $8 billion sale of 50 similar wide-body jets to China, depending on whether the plane is found to be safe.

''I fly to Beijing Sunday,'' the chief operating officer tells Casey and her team, ''and sign the letter of intent with the Minister of Transport. He's going to want to know what happened to Flight 545. And I better be able to tell him, or he'll turn around and sign with Airbus.'' He concludes: ''The future of Norton Aircraft is riding on this investigation. So I don't want to hear anything but answers. And I want them inside a week.''

Thus the reader is hurled unsubtly into Michael Crichton's latest exercise in corporate realism, which bristles like the author's previous fictions (most notably ''Disclosure,'' ''Rising Sun'' and ''Jurassic Park'') with arcane terms and technological jargon. And as much as you may be put off by the author's heavy-handed plotting and wooden characterization, you are elated to be overcoming the frustrations recently visited by the mystery of T.W.A. Flight 800, and to be able to track successfully the elusive cause of an air disaster.

What Casey's team suspects may have caused Flight 545's problem is a ''slats deploy,'' with no autopilot override. The plane in question, an N-22, has had such a problem before. In case you don't understand what this means, Casey has been assigned an assistant who is ignorant of the airframe business to whom she says spontaneously: ''You know anything about aerodynamics? No? Well, an aircraft flies because of the shape of the wing.''

She goes on to explain: ''When the aircraft is moving slower, during takeoff and landing, the wing needs greater curvature to maintain lift. So, at those times we increase the curvature, by extending sections in the front and back -- flaps at the back, and slats at the leading edge.'' The trouble is, ''If the slats extend, the plane may become unstable.'' And this appears to be what happened to Flight 545.

Casey will deliver such lectures at the drop of Mr. Crichton's fingers on his word processor. She explains why D.F.D.R.'s -- digital flight data recorders, or black boxes -- work properly in only one out of six cases. She explains that airliners are built safe but that deregulation has put such economic pressure on the airlines that corners have been cut. Counterfeit parts have been used. Maintenance has gotten sloppy.

And, Casey explains, when something goes wrong, a media industry that has grown hostile and shallow with the ascendancy of television always jumps to the wrong conclusion. Why, just look at what happened to the DC-10, ''a good aircraft . . . destroyed by bad press,'' because the crash of an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Los Angeles in May 1979 was misreported and misunderstood. But economies are also forcing technological advances, like the design of the ''Virtual Heads-Up Display,'' which projects repair manuals on the inside of sets of glasses that maintenance people can wear.

Do these lectures have anything to do with the plot of ''Airframe''? Actually, you can figure out from them approximately what is going to happen in the story. The characters are fleshed out just enough to make you care about the outcome. And Mr. Crichton has made good dramatic use of aircraft-manufacturing scenery, like the towering equipment erected to produce certain parts, or the Cycle Electrical Test, as it is known, which tests in rapid succession ''everything from cabin lights to reading lights, cockpit display panels, engine ignition and landing-gear wheels.''

Imagine searching a plane for a key part and being stalked by adversaries while such a test is going on. The scene will work well in the coming film version.

Less entertaining is Mr. Crichton's habit of saying that something significant has happened in a scene while at the same time withholding its significance. Repeatedly, a character will exclaim over seeing something yet neglect to say what it is, or the narrator will describe one character saying something to another without revealing what was said. Gradually these blank spaces form a pattern that shapes the story's climax, which turns out to be satisfying enough in its way but also manipulative and patronizing.

What Mr. Crichton inadvertently reveals by this practice is that his characters are too shallow to have thought processes, that they are binary simpletons who either know or don't know, either understand or are stunned. Altogether they nearly fit Casey's description of the engineers at Norton Aircraft: ''Emotionally, they're all 13 years old, stuck at the age just before boys stop playing with toys, because they've discovered girls. They're all still playing with toys. They have poor social skills, dress badly -- but they're extremely intelligent and well trained, and they are very arrogant in their way. Outsiders are definitely not allowed to play.''

By playing hide and seek with his plot, Mr. Crichton writes as if he were an engineer and his readers were all outsiders. Yet at the same time, he has taken on a complex subject in ''Airframe'' and made its subtleties dramatically vivid. When you finish the novel and ask yourself why you end up feeling both entertained and frustrated, you are forced to reflect that a writer clever enough to bring such material to life ought to have been able to tell his story without playing manipulative games with the reader.