Wings without a prayer

On 26 January 1998 two climbers high in the Argentinian Andes discovered the wreckage of an engine. On a shard of metal were the words "-OLLS-ROYCE". As they searched the mountainside, they found more: wing sections, fragments of clothing, strands of electrical wiring. Little did they know it, but they'd stumbled on the remains of one of the first British transatlantic airliners, lost for more than 50 years.

Its name was Star Dust, part of the fleet of BSAA, British South American Airways, one of Britain's three post-war civil aviation corporations. But, while BEA and BOAC developed into respectable household names, BSAA "would eventually become the most dangerous airline in the western world".

Jay Rayner, novelist and journalist, has turned to the story of Star Dust and BSAA for his first foray into book-length non-fiction. It undoubtedly is a good story: the cast of eccentrics on Star Dust's final flight, the fleet of converted Lancaster bombers pressed into service under the ruthless command of air vice-marshal Don Bennett, the hair-raising stories of early transatlantic air travel, the scramble as late 20th century journalists fight each other to be first to the crash site.

Though he played no direct part in Star Dust's final flight, Bennett is the book's dark hero. From the start, his life was dedicated to aeroplanes: he even claimed to have remembered the Wright brothers giving an exhibition in his hometown of Toowoomba, Queensland, when he was aged just three. A veteran of a long-haul floatplane service to South Africa, the first man to fly cargo across the North Atlantic, with extensive wartime bombing behind him, he seemed the obvious choice to run BSAA.

Compared with the muffled luxury of today's travel on a Boeing 747-400, going by one of Bennett's converted Lancaster bombers was an undoubtedly raw aviation experience. It was also anything but cheap: the £352 return from Britain to South America was about the equivalent of £8,000 today. For that, passengers were given bags of cotton wool with which to pack their ears, oxygen tubes as the plane climbed over 20,000ft, and boiled sweets.

Expensive, then, and far from safe. Soon after BSAA's first crash in Africa in September 1946 - in which all 24 passengers and crew were killed - a new joke was doing the rounds. "BOAC will take good care of you; BEA will get you there and back again; BSAA will inform your next of kin." Disregard for the rules of civil aviation was as much a problem for BSAA's former bomber-pilot crew members as the questionable mechanics of the planes themselves. The airline was distinguished - claimed a British Embassy telegram from Rio to the Civil Aviation Ministry in London - by a "complete lack of flying discipline".

In reconstructing the final flight of Star Dust, flight CS59, Rayner retells the pilots' last hours before they boarded the plane, the snatched kisses with girlfriends in alleyways and, as the plane makes its final take-off - from Buenos Aires to Santiago - he pieces together its last moments. At 1741hrs on 2 August 1947 radio operators in Santiago received its final message: the letters S.T.E.N.D.E.C. in Morse code, a sequence that remains a puzzle to this day.

By the time BSAA ceased operations in July 1949, 10 of its 36 planes had been destroyed in crashes, including two that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle. As for Star Dust, most likely it flew head on into a jetstream in the days before pilots knew about such things. And so the crew brought the plane down, confidently assuming they had passed the mountains, when in fact they were still in the heart of them.