TURBULENCE

Near-miss thriller about a commercial airliner threatened with hijacking—by all of its passengers.

Meridian Airlines Flight 6—to London, then Capetown—has a crew remarkable for its special blend of ineptitude and mean-spiritedness. Its captain, Phil Knight, is a boob. Its chief flight attendant, Judy Jackson, is an authentic Messalina. Between them they succeed in so enraging 320 passengers that, collectively, they reach the edge of the first mutiny in commercial airlines history. Also on board this Bounty-like 747 is Dr. Brian Logan, the stuff of powder kegs. He blames Meridian Airlines for the death of his beloved wife and unborn child. Brian Logan, the powder keg, and Judy Jackson, the igniter, clash explosively almost at once. Punchable Judy, whose regard for her passengers is minuscule, and whose approach to maintaining order is Hitlerian, has already accomplished the inevitable: every last Flight 6 passenger wants her off the plane, with or without a chute. At this point, pilot Knight gets a reading that seems to indicate engine trouble. His much smarter copilot attempts to allay hysteria: the reading is at fault, not the engine, he insists. Panicked way beyond the reach of reason, Knight makes an emergency landing in Nigeria in the middle of a firefight. The copilot is wounded and left behind. By now NATO, the CIA, and other alphabet groups have become convinced that dread things are happening aboard Flight 6—and that it carries a weapon of some kind aimed at a European capitol. Meanwhile, of course, Flight 6's radio has gone dead. So, will the US Navy have to shoot down Flight 6, sacrificing hundreds of lives for the sake of thousands? A nail-biter if only. . . .

If only aviation expert Jance (Headwind, 2001, etc.) weren't quite so transparently manipulative. A less bizarre Judy, for instance, might have kick-started that old willing suspension of disbelief.