(FORTUNE Magazine) – When mega-author Michael Crichton writes, many trees fall. Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher of his latest novel, Airframe, has ordered up a massive two-million print run for starters. There's a $10 million movie deal, of course, and surely someone is cobbling up a promotional Website about airline safety, his subject this time around. Who knows? Perhaps your local McDonald's will soon be handing out tiny wrecked jetliners and bloodied passengers as Happy Meal toys.

Yet as publishing events go, Airframe in no way matches up with flashy Crichton hits of the past like Jurassic Park and Congo. The plot here, such as it is, revolves around a five-day workweek of a plucky single mom and quality assurance specialist--think Demi Moore in a hardhat--at a fictional Southern California aircraft manufacturer. Her Monday starts off badly when one of the company's wide-bodied jets begins to "porpoise"--climb rapidly and then descend rapidly several times--over the Pacific. Three passengers are killed and scores more injured, alerting the media to the aircraft's possible design problems.

As the week progresses, our heroine scrambles around trying to find out what caused the incident. Along the way she messes around with all manner of electronic gadgetry, fends off hostile reporters, uncovers an intricate boardroom plot, and is stalked by mysterious goons on the factory floor. (She blithely assumes that they are disgruntled union members.) By Friday--wonder of wonders--she determines that all was not as it first seemed and saves the day.

That's it--pretty thin gruel to build a Happy Meal around. But Crichton didn't get to be a literary gazillionaire by failing to do his homework and deliver a measure of believability to pop-fiction readers. His protagonist never misses a chance to toss industry jargon around, offering at one point in her search for aerodynamic truth: "Maybe there's an electrical fault in the hydraulics actuators. Maybe the proximity sensors failed. Maybe the avionics code is buggy. We'll check every system until we find out what happened, and why."

The author is also canny enough to stud his narrative with genuine air-safety issues, of the sort that make all of us who fly at least a bit wary. There's talk of the Aloha Airways plane that opened up like a sardine can in flight because of metal fatigue a few years back. Crichton delves into the scarifying use of counterfeit aircraft parts by foreign carriers. He documents the aging of U.S. airline fleets, and he dismisses the FAA and other regulatory agencies as corrupt or useless.

All this is compelling stuff, and the author might have framed a genuinely important novel around the subject of air safety. But in the end he fails badly. One key reason is that his characters are cartoons. Here's how Crichton introduces his protagonist: "With her short dark hair, she was appealing in a tomboyish sort of way--long-limbed and athletic. Men were comfortable around her; they treated her like a kid sister."

The author doesn't help his cause by lapsing into factual errors here and there. He has one character describe an aircraft wing as being "two hundred feet--nearly as long as a football field." Well, two-thirds as long, anyway. Boeing's public-relations staffers, in the real world exceedingly reporter-friendly, are put down as hostile to all media.

Yet Crichton's biggest factual whopper is one of tone. Throughout this book, most aircraft manufacturing executives, airline people, regulators, and journalists who cover the beat are presented as essentially cynical about safety in the air. And that is simply wrong, as anyone who has dealt with the air-travel industry knows. A few years ago a pilot doing a walk-around inspection of a plane at a Sunbelt airport noticed that a section of wing was melting in the noonday sun. A part that was supposed to be metal was in fact a plastic counterfeit. News of the event rippled through the industry, and every U.S. airline stepped up scrutiny to weed out counterfeit parts.

Similarly, Miami-based Eastern Air Lines suffered through some of the most bitter labor strife in U.S. aviation history in the late Eighties. Yet not once did workers threaten to endanger passengers in any way. In truth, Crichton is the cynic here. He's the one exploiting our fears to make a buck.