Flight Path: A Novel

By Jan David Blais

FLIGHT PATH examines the question -- when economics and airline safety collide, whose hands are on the controls? A fiction that reads like fact it tells the story of a major airline struggling to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965460703
• ISBN13: 9780965460705
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: Highpoint Press
• Length: 481 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.5" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Accurate, industry people could put names to characters

This book, especially for those associated with the industry, is a "can't put it down". The story will show how the sharks really operate.

A thrilling immersion into airlines and their business.

Last year I flew 70,000 miles - not a lot by some sales managers' standards, but enough to cause me to feel very close to the men and women who make the airplanes go. Flight itself always seems a miracle to me - that large cylindrical tubes can regularly rise in the air is amazing enough, but that they can contain hundreds of people laughing, dining and sleeping is beyond what my grandfather could have conceived, and strains my own credulity. Flight Path is the story of the people who manage the planes. These people work in companies of huge size and vast complexity. And these companies are businesses with billions of dollars at stake. Who built them? Who owns them? And how are they controlled today. Starting with a bomb scare, and ending with the crash of a seemingly brilliant career, Flight Path tells the story of BellAir (read Eastern or TWA) a huge airline fighting for survival in the newly deregulated 1980's. The founder is aging, the banks who have loaned millions of dollars for planes are growling, and the culture of the company as a family is cracking. How will the company transform itself to survive in the era of infinite competition? The story is human, and I got very involoved with Charlie Bell the founder and one of the great airline builders, Philip Hartley, his anointed Wall-Street successor with no airline background, Philip's ambitious and manipulative wife Elaine, and Arthur Winston, the banker-board member who plays Svengali behind all the scenes. And along the way I was swept up with people who range from Frank Delgado, the owner of a California feeder airline who wants independence but needs BellAir's traffic, to Shelly Gregory, Philip's drug-addicted lover. A novel of the air, technology drives events. A story about business, powerful men try to mould the company to their will. A drama of ambition, failure, and high stakes finance, contemporary society is opened to view. Flight Path is compelling, fast paced, and intricately plotted. It's a must read for those interested in modern business and the airline industry.