The Vanishing of Flight MH370 by Richard Quest

Quest also covered the Pan Am 101 crash at Lockerbie and the disastrous way waiting friends and relatives were handled at JFK. As the tragedy unfurled, he interviewed Boeing 777 captains, Malaysia prime minister Najib Razak and the then airline chief executive, Ahmad Yahya. Interspersed with the narrative is a history of air crashes and he also points out that airline travel is the safest form of transport, with 939 deaths reported in 2014 against 3.6bn flying passengers. On the technical front, he has spoken to pilots, and those involved with air traffic. It is very thorough from an operational point of view, dealing with airline customer service and media relations, the workings of the CNN newsroom, and also aero politics. His book is a technical volume that speaks airline parlance while attempting to describe events that members of the public can understand, just like his TV audience. Quest has lived and breathed the flight since that fateful March day and probably knows more about the event than any living soul. The Vanishing of Flight MH370 is a fine book dealing with a complex subject that takes real understanding. He flew with and interviewed Fariq Hamid, co-pilot of the doomed Boeing, just 16 days before the fateful flight, from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur. Reporter, plane spotter and one other very important aspect makes Quest the ideal historian for MH370. Should more wreckage or even the aircraft be discovered, the book will have to be reprinted in a revised form. His book, The Vanishing of Flight MH370, published exactly two years after the disappearance on Friday 7 March 2016, is a true detective story with no ending. When he was called by the newsroom at 19:30 in his New York apartment on Friday 7 March 2014 advising that a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 was missing, little did he know the events that followed were going to embrace his whole life. He is also an aviation enthusiast and follows the airline industry, having interviewed most of the prominent air travel notables over the past three decades. Starting at the BBC many years ago, he now anchors CNN’s Quest Means Business daily from New York.

Richard Quest is a fine, responsible and very experienced journalist concentrating on business travel. She was in radio contact until the final moments. To put it in perspective, it is now 70 years since American Amelia Earhart was lost on a record-breaking flight over the south-western Pacific Ocean. Last week, BTN's editor-in-chief paid a fleeting visit to the French island of Reunion, off the coast of Madagascar, where the only evidence so far as to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370 just over two years ago was discovered. ON TOUR SPECIAL: The Vanishing of Flight MH370 by Richard Quest