Interview with aviation expert John Nance

John J. Nance is the author of Pandora’s Clock, The Last Hostage, Medusa’s Child, and many other novels and non-fiction books. He is an aviation consultant for ABC, and an airline correspondent for Good Morning America. A licensed aerospace attorney, Nance was also a full-time working airline captain until his recent retirement, and now records his own novels for Brilliance Audio. I met him at the Audie Awards in L.A., and also talked to him via phone at his home in Tacoma, Washington. From the vault:

JONATHAN LOWE: What is your background, and how did you get into writing about aviation?

JOHN NANCE: I have a varied background. In fact, the joke around my place was I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I have a legal, a journalistic, and an aviation background. As a kid I was fascinated by books, by radio and television, and by planes, and so it’s amazing that all of those have areas have come together the way they have.

LOWE: What within aviation specifically is your background?

NANCE: I’ve been a pilot for many years. Got my original pilot’s license in 1965 in Honolulu, and returned to the mainland to go to Southern Methodist University, where I got my undergraduate and law degrees. Was an Air Force pilot from ’70 to ’75 on active duty, and basically flew the C-141, the Lockheed Airlifter, for about 23 years, serving in Vietnam and Desert Storm. When I got out of active duty, I flew with Braniff International as an airline pilot until the company’s demise in ’82, then I began my writing career, and also joined Alaska Airlines in ’85 until my retirement.

LOWE: What made you want to write fiction about things going wrong on airline flights, and with terrorism?

NANCE: My transition from non-fiction to fiction was the realization that you can do more with fiction. I had four non-fiction books in the ’80s, all of them successful, but the reality was that anytime you write a non-fiction book, you have a very specific audience, and that audience doesn’t build as well as with fiction. The opportunity in fiction is that you can say what you want to say in multi-dimensional layers, as well as to give everybody a rip-snorting good story, and they don’t have to be interested in all the background, which just makes colorful wallpaper.

LOWE: Dale Brown and some others focus on military jets, but yours may generate more empathy from readers in that they focus on commercial airline flights. Let’s hope this never happens, but I love the one where the pilot locks himself in the cabin and flips the plane to prevent people from breaking into the cabin, while the authorities on the ground think there’s a bomb on board.

NANCE: One of the things I’ve had fun with is the Mr. and Mrs. Anybody could be here. Any of us could climb on board one of those airliners. But I am branching out to show other elements of aviation, too. Things that are not only fascinating, but also serve humanity.

LOWE: Which you incorporate into your fiction.

NANCE: Absolutely. Grisham writes on the stage of southern law. Robin Cook writes on the stage of medicine. I write on the stage of aviation.

LOWE: You write a lot of books, too. What does your schedule look like?

NANCE: It’s usually somewhat chaotic, but the more I can get uninterrupted time to concentrate on all the little details that make up a story, the faster it goes for me. I usually reserve about two months per book for the actual writing, once the research and plotting is done.

LOWE: Did you ask to narrate your own books, and what was that experience like for you?

NANCE: Since I was a radio broadcaster, and trained in voice, and had done a little acting in the past, I really didn’t want anyone else narrating my books, if I could cut it. The first one I did was “Pandora’s Clock,” but I remember the experience was great, and a director named Dan really helped me find the subtle nuances, and learn how to do the voices without overdoing them.

LOWE: I think you do a great job, while some authors don’t. I was thinking they should have an audiobooks channel on airline flights, since they have so many music and talk channels. Although I’m not sure how your books would play with skittish or paranoid first time flyers.

NANCE: I know, that’s been a little consternating to me in the past, this idea that you wouldn’t want to read a John Nance book on an airplane. Before 9/11, I was seriously considering a campaign at the airports which would have said, “Are you brave enough to read a John Nance book?” When I’m not using an airliner as the foundation for the story, then it’s not a personal threat, and I think it’ll be more acceptable to people on flights.

LOWE: Could you describe your novel “Skyhook?”

NANCE: It’s a lot of fun, about two very smart young women, one a lawyer and one an executive for a shipping line. The executive’s father is a pilot, and one night the plane carrying both her parents disappears over the Gulf of Alaska. This leads to a rescue with the help of the lawyer getting help from the Coast Guard. The problem is that the Coast Guard pilot loses his airplane, an old WWII amphibian, and he’s almost sure he hit something, but he’s not sure what. He was at low altitude in a fogbank, at night, you understand, and unfortunately the FAA wants to take his license, and accuse him of drinking, although he believes he did nothing wrong. At the same time there’s a parallel story about an Air Force black project, as someone is fooling around with a code used by the top secret Skyhook project, and the software engineer involved doesn’t know why. The books deals with how these two stories interplay, and how Ben Cole, the young scientist, is presented with all sorts of scary dilemmas, and ends up finding out the connection.

LOWE: An interesting and involving plot. What’s next for you?

NANCE: Next will be “Fireflight,” which I’m about to record. It has to do with the people with fight fires from the air, flying those big, lumbering ancient airplanes in the middle of what is very often a firestorm. It’s an incredible community, these people who use a dwindling number of available aircraft to fight fires. The story follows an air tanker pilot who is fighting to contain a forest fire near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that is threatening Yellowstone National Park.

Night Gallery with Anne Serling

ANNE SERLING is author of the memoir As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling. She is director of Rod Serling Books. A recent book from the University Press of Mississippi is Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination, by Nicholas Parisi. SCOTT SKELTON is a resident of Eugene, Oregon, and graduated with a bachelor of science degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has written freelance articles for the Eugene Register-Guard and other local publications. Now focused on completing a fiction novel, his first book was Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: A Retrospective. He is also currently working on a coffee-table book reproducing the artwork used on Night Gallery and chronicling its history.In addition, Scott and coauthor Jim Benson have recorded commentaries and provided special feature material for Universal Home Entertainment’s second and third season DVD releases of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. They have, in addition, provided commentaries for Image Entertainment’s high-definition blu-ray releases for The Twilight Zone, seasons two through five. 

Jonathan Lowe)  How did your books come about with Anne Serling in 2013, with Carol and Jodi sharing copyright, and what is it about these stories which resonates with you both today?

Scott Skelton)  Anne got in touch with us when she was writing her memoir, and wanted to reproduce some of our commentary on her father’s work from our companion guide, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour. We established more of a friendship when she was working on creating the Rod Serling Books imprint and reprinting his old Bantam paperbacks Night Gallery and Night Gallery 2, for which she asked us to write the forewords.As for Serling’s stories, his writing attracted me from the first because of his innate storytelling skill—he spins a damned good yarn—but it has always resonated with me long past the point where I turn the final page or when the film fades to black because of his sympathetic, penetrating humanist viewpoint and his gift for language—in his dramas expressed as dialogue—that is both pithy and lyrical. It’s just a pleasure to listen to.

Anne Serling) We started Rod Serling Books with two goals in mind. To foster my father’s legacy by publishing the eight books he wrote that were then out of print, and to provide writers a platform to publish and gain recognition in a difficult market, something my father would have enthusiastically endorsed. Unfortunately the latter hit a rights issue that we are currently working to resolve as publishing anthologies of promising writers is something that we continue to support wholeheartedly.

JL) Love how you talk about the opening narration in reference to the script as introduction. Was particularly taken by Serling’s writing the story versions prior to the scripts. In Serling’s “The Season to be Wary” collection there’s my favorite of his, “Escape Route,” which has a hellish kind of “Pamela’s Voice” ending, but without the touch of dark humor. Starred Richard Kiley as a Nazi war criminal on the run in South America, who hopes for peace and finds the ultimate twist instead. Of course “Eyes” was the pilot, directed by newcomer Steven Spielberg. What is your favorite episode, outside of these, and why?

SS) Of the stories Serling recast from a script into prose, my favorite would have to be “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” simply because it was obviously such a personal statement and reveals so much of the man he was. But I also love “Clean Kills and Other Trophies,” “Does the Name Grimsby Do Anything to You,” “The Messiah on Mott Street,” and “Lindemann’s Catch”—all prime Serling.

AS) They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar. Like my dad, I am drawn to nostalgic pieces and also, like him, the propensity to want to return to the past. 

JL) The ocean survivor twist, hunting themes, the “first man” on the moon, the themes of ego overwhelming cultures like ours and others, the subtle asides and allusions to other literary works. It’s all applied in the stories with a touch of genius few who haven’t read these books, or the others story books related to The Twilight Zone, may not realize, true?

AS) True. My father was quoted as saying he saw television as a means of bringing theater to everyone and I believe he saw juxtaposing the human condition against everyday events as the ultimate theater drama.

SS) Yes, that’s true. In drama, a writer depends a great deal on the actor to reflect something of the inner life of the character, especially since it’s not possible to tell the whole story, every facet, with dialogue or off-screen narration. But in his prose pieces, Serling reveals an extra dimension that he alone provides about the emotional depth of his characters’ psyches, and that may surprise those who are only used to his dramatic works.

JL) Talk about the Peekaboo Gallery show, as Anne was unable to attend. What has been visitor reaction? 

SS) The show was a great success from what I’ve seen and from what Taylor White has told me. The response has been very positive, and we’ve met a lot of people who came a long way to see the gallery paintings and sculptures up close, to absorb in more intimate surroundings the craft of the painters and sculptors who worked on the series. Tom Wright had a great time seeing his paintings again, rubbing elbows with fans, answering questions, and even bringing some folks he works with now in his current role as a TV director to see what he did in a previous life. 

JL) Surprise guests?

SS) Actor Mark Harmon, who works with Tom on NCIS, and his wife, actress Pam Dawber, visited to check out the paintings on display, and Tom’s daughters, both artists themselves now, showed up, too!