When those of us who don't understand how the process works strap ourselves into the giant metal cylinder, we often get a little nervous. We know the statistics that are so often thrown out: You're safer in an airplane than you are in a car, airplanes are the safest form of travel, and so on. It really doesn't change the fact that 30,000 feet is a long way to drop, and if you don't understand what's holding you up in the first place, you're bound to get a little nervous.

"Even if you tried to get into an airplane accident as a passenger, you would have to fly probably for the next 4,000 years before you would have a really solid, statistical chance," says John Nance reassuringly. And he should know. He's been a Boeing 737 captain for a major airline for several years, an Air Force pilot who flew in Vietnam and Desert Shield/Storm, a Lieutenant Colonel in the USAF Reserve, ABC's aviation analyst (including being the aviation editor for Good Morning America), and a best-selling author of two nonfiction and seven fiction books on airplanes and the airline industry. In all, he's logged more than 13,000 hours of flight time. His latest novel, BLACKOUT, has just been released.

His confidence in air travel hasn't stopped Nance from making airplane thrillers a successful writing venture. His books include FINAL APPROACH, PANDORA'S CLOCK, and MEDUSA'S CHILD (the last two were turned into successful television miniseries). You could say flying is a passion of his.

"The bottom line is this: Probably the greatest achievement technologically in human history has been the airline industry." he contends. "I know some people would tend to say, 'Now, wait a minute, our greatest achievement is cracking the atom or coming up with this advance or that advance.' But when you stop and consider the fact that, within the range of a hundred years, we have gone from no-powered flight to making air transportation literally routine, basically bus lines with wings all over the world in we fly millions and millions and millions of passengers every year and bring them back in the same condition as they left, although not as well-fed, it is virtually incredible. That to me is one of the greatest success stories of technology in human history. There is no question that it is safer to fly in a commercial environment than any other form of transportation, including pretty much walking through your own house. More people are killed in bathtubs every year than in commercial crashes."

In fact, Nance is more worried about your safety if you travel with a cold. If you have a bad enough infection, the pressure of plugged ears could conceivably lead to a punctured eardrum-not exactly life-threatening, and it's certainly repairable, but it's still quite painful. (By the way, whether you have a cold or not, the best way to unplug your ears is the old-fashioned, commonsense method: Pinch your nostrils with your fingers and blow out gently but steadily until your ears are open.

"The reason it is so safe to fly is because (the airline industry) is run by people, like myself, who are professional, card-carrying, raving paranoids about safety," Nance asserts. "In other words, this industry is very delicately balanced and we cannot blink, we absolutely cannot blink, or safety will suffer. So, while it gives the appearance of being incredibly safe. it is only incredibly safe because of a tremendous amount of consistent human effort paid to keeping that level of safety at the highest realms. So, what I am telling you is really a dichotomy. On one hand, we have achieved incredible levels of safety. On the other hand, we have to work many times harder than just a few decades ago to keep it at these levels."

Nance broke onto the scene with 1984's SPLASH OF COLORS, the story of Braniff Airline's rise and fall, but before that, he was a journalist, a broadcaster, a professional speaker (which he still is), and a lawyer (I don't know whether it's because I collect professions or I am just not sure what I want to be when I grow up," he jokes). BLIND TRUST came in 1986, and with it, Nance became perhaps the most vocal opponent of deregulation of the airline industry. "BLIND TRUST put me into the crucible of being about the only one with any credibility in the country to be standing up and pointing at the Reagan administration and saying, "Now, wait a minute, deregulation is having an effort on safety," Nance says. "Suddenly, I was on everybody's rolodex."

One call was from a publisher, who wanted Nance to do a book on how the National Transportation Safety Board operates. Out of that discussion came FINAL APPROACH in 1990. Nance has been writing pulse-pounding airline novels ever since, but don't mistake him for a one-trick pony.

"I write on the stage of aviation just as Robin Cook writes on the stage of medical practice," Nance says. "And I think it's important to make that distinction. I don't write airplane books. And even though I am called "the master of the airplane thriller' and all that, it's the same degree to which Robin writes against the background of medical practice of John Grisham writes against the background of Southern law. It doesn't restrict any of us. You will always see some involvement in my mainstream fiction that will take you into a world that, unless you're a professional airline person, you've probably never seen. It can be any aspect of aviation. The thing that is dominant in my books is the interplay with the characters' personalities, and that is actually why we read: to see people we care about try to get themselves out of some accelerated problems. The tools I use happen to have wings and tail on them."

After BLACKOUT, "Nance plans to continue both the fiction and nonfiction aspects of his career. He's keeping his next nonfiction project under wraps for the time being, but mentions that he will probably write about the state of the healthcare industry and how to improve it (Nance truly is a jack-of-all-trades). He's also happy to announce that he'll keep doing the edge-of-your-seat tales readers have come to love from him.

"I have a very loyal audience that seems to continually enjoy those," he says, "and it is a great challenge for me to come up with new and unique plots each time that expand all over the place, not just in aviation. And they take you over the entire panoply of the human experience, wherever I can come up with a great idea to go."

John Hogan is the editorial manager of Pages.

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