Over the holidays, the hubster and I climbed into a little Cessna 172 putt-putt and flew approximately 1700 nautical miles to see both sets of 'rents who happen to live 900 miles apart. That's about 20 hours in the cramped cockpit. Not all that different from sitting down at a computer for 8 hours at a time, when you think about it. Plus, you get to avoid being strip-searched, having to remove your shoes, and standing in long lines at airports OR swerving to avoid large trucks and bad drivers on the Interstates.
It's an amazing way to travel.
There are a lot of interesting sights up there you can't get on the ground or even in commercial jets, since they fly at high altitudes. At around 7-9,000 feet, you can watch the sunset and see lights wink on in cities below, like groups of synchronous fireflies. You can see a rainbow wrapping around you in a 360-degree prismatic circle while watching trawlers off the coastline over the aquamarine waters which are sometimes clear enough to catch a glimpse of a submarine near the Florida/Georgia border. The eeriest sensation is flying at night in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), in a cocoon of clouds that feels like you're enveloped in your own little universe, with only the occasional disembodied ATC voice over the radio to remind you that you're somewhere over the U.S. (well, that and the GPS, if you have one). It's almost like something out of the Twilight Zone.
It set me to thinking about mystery novels featuring pilots, and while there are a good number of stand-alone thrillers (this page lists a few), there aren't many series featuring pilots or aviation. Marcia Muller is probably the best known, with her protagonist and San Francisco-based private detective Sharon McCone, a general aviation pilot who marries another pilot with a shadowy past in an unnamed intelligence agency. In Both Ends of the Night, McCone helps her friend and former flight instructor, Matty, investigate the disappearance of her boyfriend. When Matty dies in a suspicious plane crash, McCone is convinced the boyfriend's disappearance is connected to her friend's death and will stop at nothing to solve the case. An excerpt from the first page reads, "Landing at Los Alegres Municipal Airport felt like coming home. I angled in on the forty-five toward mid-field, turned downwind, and pressed the button on my headset. 'Los Alegres traffic, Cessna four-four-two-five Whiskey, downwind for landing, two-niner.' The 150 I'd rented at Oakland was identical to the plane I'd trained in. Los Alegres was where I'd learned the ABC's of flying."
Muller once said in a New York Times interview that "Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons. Most of my friends called that a devotion to my work bordering on insanity. While roaring down a rapidly shrinking runway at 90 miles per hour in a contraption that resembled nothing so much as a matchbox with wings eventually became commonplace, my airborne experiences were such that I determined never to allow McCone to take up skydiving."
John J. Nance, an ABC aviation analyst, has written several aviation-related thrillers (Fire Flight, Blackout, Turbulence). Some feature pilots, some don't, but most use what Publishers Weekly called his "his successful formula of race-against-the-clock plotting and in-flight suspense."
Author Tom Casey, an American Airlines pilot, has written a couple of stand-alone suspense novels featuring different pilot protagonists. Human Error has pilot Hugo Price questioning whether his personal problems contributed to a fatal plane crash. In Strangers' Gate, pilot Jason Walker cashes out of his job as a dot-com executive shortly before his marriage goes up in flames, and finds himself in the middle of a drug money scheme. Norman Mailer said of the latter book, "I know of no other American novel where the protagonist is an accomplished pilot who can also write the story with his own fair share of winged prose."
Although not pilot-related, Lynne Heitman has a series of four books to date featuring former airline operations manager turned private investigator Alex Shanahan. Heitman herself was the former American Airlines general manager at Logan Airport.
Not a long list, to be sure, but there are probably others. With gazillions of mystery series featuring all sorts of unusual protagonist occupations, I have to wonder why there aren't more pilots in the mix, especially with over 600,000 active certificated pilots in the U.S. alone. Perhaps my mother and brother--both entrenched aerophobes--may hold a clue.
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