Ten Great Books set aboard airplanes

18th June 2022

Ten Great Books set aboard airplanes. Many brilliant and varied stories are written about the joys, adventures and hazards of flying. Here we select ten of our absolute favourites.

‘Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.’ – Leonardo Da Vinci.

The Flight by Julie Clark

Claire and Eva lead very different lives, but they have one thing in common – they are both in huge danger and need to disappear.

A chance encounter at the airport presents the two women with a simple but crazy solution: switch places then drop off the grid when they land.

But one woman will never reach her destination.

The Flight has been highly acclaimed across the world and delivers a smart, tense and twisting narrative that will have you hooked from the first page to the last. It’s the perfect escapism, wherever you are!

Seat 7a by Sebastian Fitzek

Psychiatrist Mats Krüger knows that his irrational fear of flying is just that – irrational. He knows that flying is nineteen times safer than driving. He also knows that if something does happen on a plane, the worst place to be is seat 7a.

That’s why on his first plane journey in twenty years – to be with his only daughter as she gives birth – Mats has booked seat 7a, so no one else can sit there. If no one is sat there, surely nothing will go wrong.

But shortly after take-off, Mats receives a worrying phone call. The caller has kidnapped his daughter and will murder her – and her unborn child – unless Mats convinces the pilot to crash the plane, killing everyone on board.

As the plane nears its destination, Mats must make an impossible choice and face the fact he might be the arbiter of his own worst fear.

Falling by T J Newman

You just boarded a flight to New York.

There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard.

What you don’t know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot’s family was kidnapped.

For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die.

The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane.

Link to: Guardian article about inspiration behind the thriller

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian

Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She’s a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with. She sees his dark hair. His utter stillness. And blood, a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. Afraid to call the police – she’s a single woman alone in a hotel room far from home – Cassie begins to lie. She lies as she joins the other flight attendants and pilots in the van. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it’s too late to come clean-or face the truth about what really happened back in Dubai. Could she have killed him? If not, who did?

Set amid the captivating world of those whose lives unfold at forty thousand feet, The Flight Attendant unveils a spellbinding story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol and the devastating consequences of addiction, and of murder far from home.

Now a mini series on TV.

The Perfect Girlfriend by Karen Hamilton

Juliette loves Nate.
She will follow him anywhere. She’s even become a flight
attendant for his airline, so she can keep a closer eye on him.

They are meant to be.
The fact that Nate broke up with her six months ago means nothing.
Because Juliette has a plan to win him back.

She is the perfect girlfriend.
And she’ll make sure no one stops her from
getting exactly what she wants.

True love hurts, but Juliette knows it’s worth all the pain…

Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

You can save hundreds of lives.

Or the one that matters most.

The atmosphere on board the inaugural non-stop flight from London to Sydney is electric. Numerous celebrities are rumoured to be among the passengers in business class and journalists will be waiting on the ground to greet the plane.

Mina is one of a hand-picked team of flight attendants chosen for the landmark journey. She’s trying to focus on the task in hand, and not worry about her troubled five-year-old daughter back at home with her husband. Or the cataclysmic problems in her marriage.

But the plane has barely taken off when Mina receives a chilling note from an anonymous passenger, someone intent on ensuring the plane never reaches its destination. Someone who needs Mina’s assistance and who knows exactly how to make her comply.

It’s 20 hours to landing.

A lot can happen in 20 hours….

The Pilot’s Daughter by Audrey J Cole

Welcome aboard Pacific Air Flight 385, with nonstop service from Seattle to Honolulu.

Cora is scared to fly again after her husband died in a recent helicopter crash in Pago Pago.

A thousand times she has told herself to turn around, not get on the flight, go back to her young children.

But now, she’s seated in first class across the aisle from the girlfriend of a famous billionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur.

Halfway across the Pacific, the flight is hijacked. Six people are dead—including the pilots.

Cora is a young widow, mother, and emergency room nurse…but as the world closes in around her, she’s also a pilot’s daughter.

Lost off radar in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, the motive behind the hijacking remains a mystery. Not knowing who to trust, Cora works with the man seated beside her, Seattle Homicide Detective Kyle Adams, to save herself along with the remaining one hundred and fifty-four souls on board.

Turbulence by David Szalay

Twelve people on the move around planet Earth, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil, and each in some way touching the next.

In this nuanced and deeply moving sequence, David Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the world in twelve plane journeys, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers and parents, children and siblings, or nobody at all.

Along the way, Szalay deftly depicts the ripple effect that, knowingly or otherwise, a person’s actions have on those around them, and invites us to consider our own place in the vast and delicately balanced network of human relationships that is the world we live in today.

Mile High by Rebecca Chance

First class is about to get dangerous . . . Pure Air’s new LuxeLiner is flying from London to LA – its inaugural journey – with a first-class cabin packed with A List celebrities. As the feuding crew compete to impress their famous passengers, the handsome pilot tries to win the attention of a pretty young stewardess. But one VIP singer is battling something seriously sinister: watching her every step is a very determined stalker, someone who will go to any lengths to get the star to satisfy their desires. At thirty thousand feet there is nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide…

Air Babylon by Imogen Edwards Jones

Air Babylon is a trawl through the highs, the lows, and the rapid descents of the travel industry. It catalogues the births, the deaths, the drunken brawls, the sexual antics, and the debauchery behind the scenes of the ultimate service industry – where the world is divided into those who wear the uniform and those who don’t…

Enjoy the experiences!

BONUS BOOKS

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

Flying from Paris to Croydon…

A woman is killed by a poisoned dart in the enclosed confines of a commercial passenger plane…

From seat No.9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite; ahead, in seat No.13, sat a Countess with a poorly-concealed cocaine habit; across the gangway in seat No.8, a detective writer was being troubled by an aggressive wasp.

What Poirot did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No.2, sat the slumped, lifeless body of a woman.

The Flight by Heather J Fitt

A young mother is trapped with a killer thirty thousand feet up, in this gripping midair murder mystery by the author of Open Your Eyes.

On a plane to Barbados, nurse Melissa sits with her young son, Theo. On the same flight, up in first class, are a bride- and groom-to-be, heading for their tropical wedding destination, accompanied by family and friends.

When two members of the wedding party die in mysterious circumstances, it becomes clear that a killer is on board. Trapped in the cabin thousands of feet above the Atlantic, tensions mount as accusations fly—and when little Theo seems to vanish into thin air, this bizarre flight becomes even more turbulent . . .

Will Melissa be able to use her medical knowledge to find her son and bring a cold-blooded killer to justice before it’s too late?

Nowhere To Land by Teretha Houston

A pilot and an air marshal struggle against impossible odds to save passengers above the Atlantic Ocean when their crippled plane turns into a flying death trap.

Quentin Kane hasn’t been a detective for years, but when a mysterious woman asks the air marshal to help bring down a powerful, international organization, he gives in. The next morning, he wakes up with no memory of the woman or the odd wooden box she gave him.

Eden Stone’s first day as a Boeing 747 pilot quickly devolves into terror as increasingly more horrifying events plague her transatlantic trip. Something or someone is turning every inch of the aircraft into a deadly weapon.

Trapped thousands of miles from land, the passengers and crew have nowhere to run, nowhere to land, and they’re running out of sky.

Tony for the TripFiction Team

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