Interesting so far. You'r hitting some interesting references and have a mostly coherent story line going..... Keep writing as I want to see where the story goes. whynot
Love the bit about child and working flint. It always amazes me that while everyone knows that if you try to put a square peg in a round hole, it doesn't work, but if you choose carefully, a tapered plug is very capable of destroying the block the round hole is in, and you have the added reward of seeming to be going along with them. It is always amazing that a tapered plug is in fact a near infinite collection of inclined planes with all the ability to transfer energy effectively 90 degrees. Levers and all that sort of game, hard to visualize but working with flint, learning other languages, tanning hides, would in effect program a child's mind in the 1 year to 5 year development period in totally unexpected ways. Love the teasers and the societal comments in the story so far. Left the aircraft instrument failure up in the air, but did an excellent job of the inability of the formal instruction system and their output to correctly handle unexpected results. The inability of well trained pilots to think outside of the box and the tragic results of a simple elevator trim problem would seem to indicate you have a good point there. Next question, do you care if 90 plus percent of your readers have no concept of what is going on? Carrol and Alice's thru the looking glass comes to mind. Dodgson's was by all respects an adequate but uninspired math prof, but a brilliant author and his children's books have well stood the test of time.
As the old saying goes, all will be revealed - at some point. Working foreshadowing into a story without being so obvious is a fine line. If you understand some geophysics, you can guess what's coming... Otherwise, yu'll look up the -12 and wonder if I have a Pilatus envy issue. Certainly more fun that bashing around in a Cessna 226 heavy twin. The -226? Looks like this yes, with rocket pods and a crude sighting system. The spotting rocket only had to hit the ground.... Cessna O-2 Skymaster - Wikipedia
It jumps around from the start of the disaster to way in the future quickly. What happened in between?
