Review: Music's Broken Wings - Fifty Years of Aviation Accidents in the Music Industry

Pilot/Author William P. Heitman has written a very unique text entitled Music's Broken Wings. This text, which I believe just might be the first of its kind, is an account of the plane crashes that killed popular music's most cherished star. Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Jim Croce, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Randy Rhoads, and Ricky Nelson are among the stories here.

But this is not some half-baked music history coffee table book. These are the actual official reports, accident files, and stories of the crashes themselves. This book actually is written from a pilot's point of view as much as a musician's. Issues like flight plans, spatial disorientation, weather problems and the like are covered in detail about each of these doomed flights. This gives the reader some much-needed insight into the tragic stories. As an example: the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens (Clear Lake, IA 2/3/59) is one of the most discussed accounts in recent music history, and one of the most closely scrutinized. Heitman's book explores and provides all of the official documentation about the crash, in terms of reports, and eyewitness testimony. The book also offers accounts about the model of plane, its specifications/ratings, and it's manufacturer history. Each chapter does this for each crash account.

Many of the issues with these famous plane crashes are also explored in depth. More often than not, weather and pilot error of some kind or another contributed to them. Heitman explores a phenomenon all-too-common to pilots called spatial disorientation. Spatial Disorientation is a condition in which a pilot loses his/her perception of her actual surroundings (kind of like vertigo, but not exactly). Often times, a pilot will lose sense of direction and airspeed while attempting to fly through turbulence or a severe thunderstorm. This condition often can have most perilous results, leading the pilot to believe he/she is flying in the opposite direction that they actually are. And in the case of the Holly crash, it is often attributed that pilot Roger Peterson was not properly certified to fly solely by the use of instruments as would be necessary when flying into an approaching snow storm away from the lights of a city (as Peterson was doing in the Holly crash incident).

Music's Broken Wings is a very interesting book that fills a unique niche in music history. We have lost so many great musicians and artists to plane crashes; indeed these stories have become part of American legend as it were. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Patsy Cline, Audie Murphy, Jim Croce, Ricky Nelson, Jim Reeves, Otis Redding, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Randy Rhoads, and more are chronicled in this one-of-a-kind volume. Highly recommended.