Air Babylon

Review by Philip Blazdell

After reading, somewhat under duress, the author's book Hotel Babylon, I more or less knew what this, somewhat slender tome, would bring. The blurb on the back of the book clearly sets the tone:

'Heard the one about the airline that has introduced 'corpse cupboards' on new planes to cope with the number of people who die in the air? Heard the story about the First Class air hostess who got fired for sitting on the face of a passenger during a long haul flight? Heard about the amount of knickers and false teeth that are left behind in the body of the plane? Heard how pissed-off stewards put laxatives in your drinks? Heard about the pilot who ran out of runway? Heard of the disabled passengers who miraculously walk again? No? Then you haven't read Air Babylon...'

Which is all well and good and quite possibly even exciting except that this book is so badly written and so contrived as to make it as much fun as root-canal work. The flight the that author describes in Air Babylon is initially fun. The pilot's hungover, the flight attendants are drunk, the passengers are coked up, there's a corpse in the galley, a couple is having sex in one lavatory and a junkie has OD'd in the other. Buzzing vibrators in luggage cause bomb alerts; dogs freeze solid in the hold; colostomy bags burst in economy and children spray vomit from row A to row K – which, apart from the coke bit, sounds like every Air Portugal flight I have even taken but still the book lacks any real coherence. It might, quite fairly, be compared to a long haul flight: Fun to start with, then long and boring and somewhat tedious.

Unlike her previous book (Hotel Babylon) where the narrative structure (mostly) worked this one feels terribly contrived. In trying to compress every single story she has ever heard about the aviation in industry into a relatively small book the author looses sight of the little things like character development (why should we care about the principal characters when they are portrayed as so ghastly?), sentence structure or credibility (Ryanair's notoriously fast turnaround time isn't the 40 minutes she quotes, but a far more impressive 25 — something a quick call to the airline would have established. And in a book that culminates in a flight to Dubai, there is really no excuse for not knowing your sheikhs from your Sikhs.)

However, this book isn't without some merit and there is much here which is profoundly shocking and somewhat alarming. If only half of what the author says is true then I will be very worried the next time I get on a plane. I can probably deal with the weird, yet thrilling, sport of tea-traying (thankfully only done on empty planes) but the idea of the crew abusing passengers, drugging their food or pilots taking off without fully checking their planes just scares me.

This isn't the most profound or intelligent book ever written. However, it is fun (in places) and might be fun to read whilst laying on a beach somewhere. It is also a good book to dip into from time to time, especially if, like me, you find the idea of frozen dogs amusing.

• Air Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous