Flaps Down at Eastern : GROUNDED Frank Lorenzo and the Destruction of Eastern Airlines <i> by Aaron Bernstein (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 256 pp.) </i>

Aaron Bernstein, a labor writer for Business Week magazine, presents a competent, information-packed chronology of the last decade of uniformly deleterious financial jostling over the depressurizing fuselage of Eastern Airlines. If for some reason you’re completely fascinated with the sequence in which various doomed takeover proposals for the carrier were tendered, this book will engage you. If you’re not, you are likely to find the volume more appropriate for skimming than reading.

Structurally, “Grounded” is an extremely long newspaper article, with paragraph after paragraph of facts and quotations rarely interrupted either by humor or the grace of a flowing narrative. Nor is there much analysis, except on obvious points.

Eastern’s drama touches on a half-dozen important issues that cry out for analytical dissection--the value of airline deregulation, the consequences of debt-based corporate acquisitions, the self-destructive tendencies of labor, the legitimate grievances of labor, the validity of union-busting, or even just what makes Frank Lorenzo tick. Bernstein, however, has little to say on these topics. If a reader is to spend 200 pages plowing through recitations of Eastern’s financial buffetings, there ought to be some payoff, for instance a chapter that puts into perspective the meaning of the travails of the airline, its employees and passengers. No such luck. “Grounded” gets across the message that Eastern is seriously out of whack and that Lorenzo only made things worse--two premises already widely known. The book comes to few other conclusions.

We never really get inside the skins, for example, of Eastern’s mechanic members of the International Assn. of Machinists, the group that triggered the events that led to Lorenzo’s takeover of the airline and then began the March, 1989, strike that was supposed to bring Lorenzo to his knees but instead landed Eastern in bankruptcy court, close to dissolution.

Eastern IAM members were some of the highest-paid laborers in America--$20 and up an hour--yet also among the most discontent, in a state of perpetual outrage. In 1986, they were so filled with personal enmity toward old Eastern boss Frank Borman that they scuttled an elaborately negotiated plan to keep the airline out of Lorenzo’s hands by issuing a last-minute demand that Borman be fired; their desire to see a present management adversary humiliated seemed to exceed their desire to avoid an even worse adversary.

Then after last year’s strike began and Ueberroth was preparing to buy the airline, the union scuttled another nearly done plan with a last-minute demand that a bankruptcy court replace Lorenzo with a trustee. Bankruptcy courts install trustees when they believe a company’s chief officer to be incapable of executing his duties, so such a replacement would have been greatly embarrassing to Lorenzo. But the trustee would have been at Eastern’s helm for only a few days until the sale closed, meaning the purpose of this demand was spite. At this point, Ueberroth realized the mechanics’ union was not rational, and walked away from the acquisition.

Had the 1989 Ueberroth deal gone through, Eastern mechanics would now have their high-paying jobs back. As it is, many may never work in the airline industry again--certainly not for Eastern, shrunken as it is and staffed by replacement mechanics. The machinists continue on strike to this day, though Eastern’s pilots and flight attendants have long since given up this lost cause. They celebrated as though they had “won” the strike when, a few months ago, a bankruptcy judge finally did relieve Lorenzo in favor of a trustee. The machinists were jubilant that Lorenzo was at last publicly screwed. But he was still rich, and they were still out of jobs.

What drives workers to consider sabotaging their own jobs a victory? “Grounded” appears to attribute nearly all of the Eastern mechanics’ behavior to the conventional explanation: the extremism of their chapter president, Charles Bryan, a anti-management zealot whom Bernstein reports even other IAM officials have little patience for. He quotes one top IAM official as saying Bryan “hears voices.” Anyone who’s ever encountered Bryan suspects that he has the ball but he’s not calling his own plays.

But one chapter president’s fanaticism just cannot be the whole story. At several stages, the Eastern machinists have known full well that their actions were more likely to put the airline out of business than to alter it in their favor. Something much deeper and more interesting must be at work--some advanced manifestation of the modern working man’s and woman’ s alienation from the corporate machine, an experience powerful enough to leave a person bitter even when well paid and possessing an interesting job.

Bernstein gives readers a tantalizing clue of what this embittering force might be when he mentions in passing a 1984 lull in Eastern’s storm: the fleeting Camelot in which the airline was constructively worker-owned. Suddenly, machinists underwent a conversion from feather-bedders to cost-cutters, finding ways to reduce the airline’s maintenance expenses by $30 million.

During the worker-ownership year, Eastern was even profitable. Then Borman pulled one of the all-time bonehead moves in U.S. business history, unilaterally abrogating a promise to restore wage concessions. Mutual distrust resumed its traditional place at the center of Eastern labor-management relations. More time spent on human-being issues like this, and less on stock transfer details, might have made “Grounded” a richer and more rewarding work.

Since it’s possible that Eastern will pass from existence while this book is on the stands, the publisher may enjoy a publicity windfall. Every author who writes about a news story in progress takes the gamble that his book may seen either dazzlingly prescient or hopelessly out of date in the months between turning the manuscript and the arrival of the volumes in stores.

Bernstein’s timing has been lucky enough: On Aug. 10, Frank Lorenzo bailed out of the airline business altogether, selling most of his stake in Continental Airlines Holdings, which owns Eastern and Continental airlines, and quitting as its chairman and chief executive. Thus, to repeat Bernstein’s title, Lorenzo himself is indeed “grounded.” On the other hand, the book’s subtitle declares Eastern already destroyed, and its introduction ends by stating that because of Lorenzo, “the United States (has) lost one of its oldest major airlines.”

Pardon me? Lorenzo may be history and Eastern may be a shadow of what it once was, but if you go to the airport you’ll note its planes are still flying.