HIGH STAKES ON A PLANE
How a Virgin air hostess realised her thriller plot was a winner when her pilot’s face turned white
DURING normal times around half a million people are flying at any one time, according to some estimates – their lives in the hands of just a few thousand pilots and flight attendants trusted to deliver them to their destinations. Despite sky-high safety standards and heavy regulation, the airline industry has little room for failure.
Which is why the concept behind TJ Newman’s gripping debut novel, Falling, is so chilling: what if the pilot of your jet learned their family had been kidnapped by terrorists and would be killed unless they plunged their aircraft into the ground?
Memorably described by crime writer Don Winslow as “Jaws at 30,000ft”, Newman’s debut novel, published this week, has already been snapped up by a major Hollywood studio for the big screen. Comedy thriller Airplane! it ain’t.
Putting flight attendants front and centre of the action, Newman, who spent 10 years flying with Virgin America, aimed to redress some of the misconceptions around cabin crews – namely the idea they’re glamorous window dressing.
“Flight attendants, for better or worse, are usually portrayed as party girls with loose morals and it’s just not accurate,” she says.
“Cabin crew at the beginning of commercial aviation were highly trained, highly respected; you had to have a nursing degree and I think you had to speak a second language.
“Somewhere along the way, the almighty dollar got in the way and they realised hot shorts could sell tickets or at least look good on their advertisements.
“Somehow that became the focus because it was a good marketing campaign and it just stuck. The stereotype and the image has followed flight attendants ever since and it’s been hard to shake. So I hope this book is something that can help at least dispel that stereotype – there’s more here than what you might think.”
Arizona-born Newman joined what she described as the “family business” – her mother and sister were both cabin crew – at 25 after studying musical theatre at university and “failing miserably” in New York before moving home.
“I grew up with this love of aviation,” she smiles. “I resisted it at first until the point came when I just thought, ‘I should do this’.”
Having returned to Phoenix and her parents, she took a job in a local bookstore, rekindling her love of reading and telling stories, before the opportunity to fly came up.
Her home airport was LAX in Los Angeles, necessitating a commute by aircraft. Suffice to say, she was soon spending a lot of hours airborne.
But it was during overnight “red eye” flights across the United States that Newman came up with the idea for her book.
“I knew I was on to something,” she explains. “The only time I posed the question to an actual pilot was when I first had the idea. I threw out the question: ‘You’re working a flight, your family’s kidnapped, you’re told you either crash the flight or they die.What would you do?’
“It was a casual question but the look on his face… Immediately I knew I had something, he was terrified.”
She adds quickly: “I’ve never personally experienced any sort of threat to the safety of the aircraft. But I’ve definitely had my fair
‘Flight attendants, for better or worse, are usually portrayed as party girls with loose morals’
share of medical emergencies and intoxicated passengers and people who want to put up a power struggle. I once had an incident where a woman had a complete and total psychotic breakdown. She wasn’t enough of an emergency that we could justify diverting the aircraft, so the next four hours turned into trying to manage her. There’s a huge focus in training on conflict resolution, de-escalation and people management, really. But there are only so many tools at your disposal.”
HOWEVER, Newman, 36, admits to suffering plenty of what, at best, might be described as inappropriate behaviour and, at worse, sexual harassment by passengers. “Unfortunately, that’s far more common. I’ve been cornered in my galley, I’ve been approached, all of the above for that,” she says, speaking from her home in Phoenix,Arizona.
“It’s a sad reality of the job but any time I’ve been in a situation getting to a level I was uncomfortable with, I was aware of other passengers who I knew would come to my aid if it got out of my control.
“Recently, post-Covid, we’ve seen a lot of escalation and aggression towards flight crew and, in all the videos I’ve seen, passengers usually intervene, because we [the cabin crew] are effectively outnumbered. It’s good to see people step up like that.”
Newman began working on her novel during flights, sketching out ideas and plots during snatched moments in the galley while her passengers slept.
“Sometimes I’d get entire pages in and other times it’d be a more busy flight and every time I’d get started on a good section, someone would come around the corner and ask for a drink. So it just depended,” she smiles. “On some flights if someone gave me an idea, I’d scribble it down on a napkin and shove it in my apron pocket.
“I kept it totally to myself, very few people knew I was even writing.
“But I had a small number of trusted pilots who read drafts of the book to tell me where I was getting it right, where it was wrong, because I didn’t know, being on the other side of the cockpit door.”
The book is a triumph; especially for anyone who has ever sat back in their seat, clutching their complimentary drink or snack, idly wondering what their almost always-smiley flight attendants are thinking or doing, and what might happen if something went wrong in the tense post-9/11 world of global air travel.
THE ACTION in Falling veers sharply from cockpit, where captain Bill Hoffman is warned not to reveal the kidnap to co-pilot Ben, to the cabin where his old friend Jo and her fellow attendants, new starter Kellie and veteran crew member Michael (known as Big Daddy), are faced with trying to keep the passengers calm and in the dark, to a race against time on the ground to save Hoffman’s wife, Carrie, and children, Scott and Elise.
Action in the air is not an entirely new concept, especially in film – the aforementioned Airplane!, Air Force One, United 93, Snakes On A Plane and, more recently, Sully have all explored the drama inherent in the skies. “That’s something that’s so great about aviation, it covers every aspect of storytelling,” says Newman.
“You can have a romantic comedy on a plane, a thriller, a horror, it’s an environment
that’s just ripe for telling stories.” But focusing in greater part, as Newman has, on the tight-knit cabin crew – on-screen more usually portrayed as expendable victims – gives Falling an authenticity.
On-board service, she explains, while the most visible aspect of their job, is almost the least important.
“Obviously, it’s a good day at work if the only thing I’m doing is bringing you a drink,” she says.
“We go through a rigorous training programme, for my airline it was five weeks and for some airlines it’s even longer, where we cover everything safety and security and medical related. Cabin service was one day alone.
“But service alone is not what we’re there for and, if it was, the airlines would have replaced us with vending machines a long time ago. When you’re having a heart attack, I’m not going to bring you a Diet Coke, I’m going to bring you a defibrillator and shock your heart.
“People would just assume all we did was service and wouldn’t necessarily give us the respect we deserve. But the second something goes wrong, all eyes turn to the flight attendants.
“When I hear a news report of an incident, the first thing I try to figure out is what did the cabin crew do? In the media it’s often glossed over but I know, having been on the aircraft, that they’re communicating with the flight deck, they’re communicating with the ground, they’re arranging everything.
“The flight attendants in the cabin are managing the situation and orchestrating what should happen next. They are the movers and shakers, the people that get things done.
“The pilots focus on flying the aircraft, the flight attendants focus on maintaining control in the cabin.” Attendants practice what Newman calls “CRM” – crew resource management – which basically boils down to communication. “We share everything. It’s one of the tools we have to try to identify and take care of threats before they escalate into something bigger, that can be something as small as the passenger appearing to be intoxicated.” During 2020, while she was on a voluntary furlough before quitting her airline after signing her book deal, Newman sympathised with colleagues struggling with volatile situations as a result of pandemic stress and especially mask wearing.
“The stories they’d tell me were really unbelievable,” she says. “In the States we ceased the sale of alcohol on the aircraft and for most airlines that’s not come back yet. It’s been nice to see airlines realise, whatever they make in revenue, it’s not worth it.”
SO DID she ever worry about straying into satire? “There were notes I was getting from my editor, tone down the humour…! But for flight crew, when you’re in an emergency situation, there’s part of surviving where humour is absolutely critical. So that was a delicate line to toe in the book. How do I portray the situation but not have it be too comical and teeter into Airplane! territory?”
One fall-out of the global coronavirus pandemic, ironically, is that while air travel is gradually coming back around the world, there are not enough aircraft out of moth balls and Newman has been constrained from travelling to promote her thriller.
Having struggled through 41 rejections – “With each rejection, I kept telling myself, ‘You didn’t come this far just to come this far’ – her book was picked up in a dream deal by US super-agent Shane Salerno.
With a movie contract signed with Universal and Working Title Films, Newman is now working on her follow-up.
She remains tight-lipped about its theme, though it won’t be a sequel, but adds with a smile: “All I’ll say is, you work somewhere for 10 years, I don’t think you use all of your material in one story.
But Falling is definitely the beginning, middle and end of this particular tale.”
‘In an emergency, humour is critical... but how do I not teeter into Airplane! territory?’
●Falling by T J Newman (Simon & Schuster, £14.99) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310