Flight 111:
The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash
By Stephen Kimber

“Kimber…at his best…tightly drawn vignettes depicting the utter normality that is shattered for thousands by the disaster…gladden[s] the heart even as the tears well up. But for all the emotion Kimber doesn’t allow Flight 111 to descend into sentimentality.”
The Globe and Mail

“Deftly recreates the events leading up to the crash, along with its aftermath, and puts a much-needed human face on the incident.”
The Ottawa Citizen

Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash focuses on how people cope with tragedy, in this case the crash of a Swissair jet off Nova Scotia in September 1998.

The narrative, which is told entirely in scenes, begins a few weeks before the crash and switches back and forth among the various key characters: families of some of the victims; a fisherman who rushed out that night hoping to find survivors, was traumatized by what he encountered and eventually began to come to terms with it all by befriending some of the victims’ families; local men and women involved in providing aid and comfort to the victims’ families; the coroner who had the job of telling the families their loved ones were gone and they would have no bodies to bury; a Transportation Safety Board investigator desperately trying to figure out what went wrong; and the reporter who was the first journalist on the scene.

I use their intertwined stories to unfold the broader story chronologically through the crash itself and its aftermath. In all, the book covers about nine months. Originally published in 1999, the book now available as an ebook from Amazon, Apple’s iBooks and Kobo, among others.

You can read excerpts—focusing on Lyn Romano, wife of one of the victims, here:

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