Gann's best novel derives from his own experience in flying an untrustworthy airliner from Honolulu to Portland, Oregon; the account in his autobiography is more comic, however, than the sustained suspense developed in the novel's story of a crippled plane carrying twenty-one persons from Hawaii to San Francisco. Gann effectively explains the mechanics of commercial aviation, and, more importantly, the psychology of flying. The insights into the fliers' minds as they cope with the routines of flight, with their own fears and those of their passengers, with the dependence on mechanical equipment, and, above all, with abstract notions of fate and chance give the book a timelessness not often found in contemporary popular fiction. Although set in the 1950s, aboard a propeller-driven aircraft on a twelve-hour flight, the pictures of pilots at work and in danger seem as true in the age of jet travel; if...