For Newman, a onetime bookseller who lives in Phoenix, that joke came true — and the subject matter touches on scenarios that even the most white-knuckle fliers might not dare to imagine. In his first novel, “falling,” a pilot’s family has been kidnapped and will be killed unless he crashes the plane.
His latest nail-biter, “Sinking: The Rescue of Flight 1421,” follows the survivors of a plane that plunges into the Pacific — and then into the depths of the ocean as a frantic rescue operation unfolds on the surface. The novel came out on Tuesday, just in time to scare off the crowds of travelers heading off for summer vacations.
Newman said the two ideas came to him in quiet moments while he was working on red-eye flights. He worked on the first book while flying, writing by hand on cocktail napkins or on the back of catering bills.
After working for Virgin America and Alaska Airlines, he was laid off in the early days of the pandemic and never returned to the skies. Simon and Schuster announced a seven-figure deal for two books in February 2021, and published her best-selling debut novel that summer. The two novels sparked bidding wars for the film rights, and a third book is in the works.
“You don’t work in an industry like aviation for 10 years and just have an idea like that,” he said.
Newman’s inspiration for “Drowning” came while he was flying again from Hawaii to Los Angeles and thought about how he was looking out the window at an empty. If something went wrong, he wondered, how would anyone save them? How will the people on board save themselves?
Despite the nightmarish situations, Newman says the book is ultimately about rescue, hope, resilience, and survival, with a focus on a broken family.
“I think people, when they realize that, their attitude changes and fear is not the dominant emotion,” he said.
But still, Newman said, passengers should want their flight attendants and pilots to stay out of those worst-case scenarios.
“We are trained and conditioned to constantly think, if something goes wrong, what will it look like and what am I going to do about it?” he says.
Newman throws in some of the more common crises that occur in the air, such as what might happen to a laptop in severe turbulence (it “landed on the roof of the plane like an ax without a handle”). A passenger needs an EpiPen, but the plane’s first-aid kit doesn’t have one — an issue that travelers’ rights groups have become hammering.
He said it’s interesting to raise the curtain on why flight attendants ask passengers to do things like put away their bulky items or turn their seat; it’s not to control people or make them uncomfortable.
“Everything a flight attendant makes you do, I assure you, it’s not personal,” he said. “All we ask of you is for your safety and protection.”
In the credits for “Drowning,” Newman thanks the aviation community for their support of the books, and notes that he found photos of the crew reading his novel in the jump seats. She said the reception was “really overwhelming and beautiful” from the industry – including her mother and sister, who both worked as flight attendants.
“I think the aviation community really appreciates someone on the inside kind of giving a realistic description of what it’s like down the line,” he said. “It’s been very well received because both of my books portray flight attendants as the heroes they are.”
He thinks the most misunderstood thing about flight attendants is that their main job is to pass out snacks and drinks.
“Service is just something we’re happy to provide,” Newman said. “But if you’re having a heart attack, you know, I’m not going to bring you a Diet Coke. I’ll get the defibrillator and restart your heart.”
As a full-time writer now, Newman says he’s living his dream — but he misses several aspects of flying: the crew, the journey, “the passengers, most of them.” He considers himself an aviation geek and sets his books on Airbus planes (an A320 and A321).
“Those are my planes,” he said. “That’s my home away from home.”
Right now, she’s working on an adaptation of “Falling” for Universal Pictures, writing her third book and figuring out logistics for an upcoming book tour that includes the challenge of packing for 12 author events . (Newman will appear in Politics and Prose in DC on Sunday.)
And when he travels now, Newman says he thinks about his flights in a different way: as source material. He said he doesn’t sleep or read or watch movies.
“I look around, I go, ‘Okay, what else can I break and then fix?'” he said. “How else is this crazy and we have to come up with a solution?”
