Triumph of the human spirit

On 21 August 1995, 29 people boarded a twinprop commuter plane in Atlanta, Georgia. They were bound for Gulfport, a short hop that should have taken 86 minutes. Twenty minutes into the flight, one of the propeller blades snapped in two; nine minutes 20 seconds later the plane crashed in a hay field; 60 seconds after that, fire engulfed the shattered fuselage. And yet - thanks to the courage and skill of the pilots, the flight attendants and the passengers themselves - 19 survived.

The airline was Atlantic Southeast Airlines, one of scores of such local operators across the US. The plane, too, was scarcely noteworthy: a six-and-a-half-year-old Brasilia, a workhorse that had clocked up more than 18,000 flights, an average of eight takeoffs and landings each day. What was remarkable, however, was what unfolded during the plane's final minutes. It is to this extraordinary human drama, this thrilling story of love and hope, that Gary M Pomerantz's flawlessly constructed narrative pays the finest tribute.

What drew Pomerantz to the story was both the fact that there were survivors and the manner of their escape. "How does anyone live through a plane crash?" he asked himself. His hours of interviews with survivors, their families, the rescuers, airline officials and lawyers revealed "ordinary people" whose actions displayed "the extraordinary power of the human spirit".

The book proclaims its authenticity from the start: in everything, from the technical details of the propeller manufacturer's safety checks, to the exact times the crew arrived for duty, to the misting-up of a passenger's glasses as he crossed the asphalt to board the plane, there is a meticulous, fine-grained rigour. Pomerantz, a distinguished American journalist, establishes his cast with brevity, each detail carefully-chosen. Flight attendant Robin Fech was prone to bawl out passengers who chattered through her safety briefings; captain Ed Gannaway, whose father died when he was six, had "vowed he would watch his sons grow old"; deputy sheriff Tod Thompson, "new to fugitive retrieval", carried his .38 handgun in his overnight bag.

With each new insight, each tiny description, the tension - for we know catastrophe looms - ratchets up another notch.

And then, with no warning, it happened. The loss of the sheared-off propeller blade on the left wing meant the remaining three blades, now fatally unbalanced, effectively thrashed the engine to death. At first, passengers assumed the hammering was turbulence; from the windows they saw ripped-open engine casing, "the fluids blowing into the airstream".

The narrative of the plane's spiralling descent - 3,500 feet per minute, "a six-storey drop per second" - is a masterpiece of non-fiction storytelling.

Among the passengers there is fear, resignation, awesome courage. Middle manager Alan Barrington, sure he was facing death, prayed his wife would have the strength to raise their four children. When 27-year-old Angela Brumfeld felt tears come, "she stared at the ceiling, hoping to keep them from running down her face". A mother wrote a note to her sons: "You are the Lights of My Life. Always, Mommy."

Meanwhile, in the cockpit, the pilot and first officer fought to fly the plane, wrestling with the controls, legs braced against the rudder pedals. Pomerantz has reconstructed these final minutes with such skill and tenderness that the reader - crying one moment, scarcely daring to breathe the next - is right there on board, asking, "What would I have done, how would I have reacted?'

In his afterword, Pomerantz calls his book a work of journalism; if this is so, then the word needs drastic redefinition. Nine Minutes Twenty Seconds is truer than much self-proclaimed literature, and - in its exploration of our capacity for bravery and selfless action - offers vital clues to human nature.