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John Nance is one of the foremost experts in America when it comes to airplanes and aviation issues. A decorated Air Force pilot who flew in Vietnam and Desert Storm, Nance went on to fly some of the world’s most noteworthy planes commercially for Braniff International. He currently is the aviation analyst for ABC World News.
But Nance wears many hats: he is also a lawyer and is the writer of sixteen New York Times best-selling fictional books about aviation. Nance appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program to pitch his latest thriller, “Sixteen Souls,” which combines both of his career interests in law and aviation.
“It’s kind of a legal and aviation thriller,” Nance told Berman and Riedel. “It’s about an airline pilot who had an impossible dilemma. No matter which way he went in the middle of a snowstorm- with an airplane on his right wing that he had collided with- no matter which way he goes, he’s going to end up killing somebody. What happens, I won’t give that away, but basically, he ends up in court with an overzealous prosecutor who wants to put him in jail for having made this decision, on a technical reading of the law. So, as a lawyer, it was a lot of fun to put these two together.”
Nance did address the recent spate of aircraft incidents in the news; he says it’s partially our own fault for blowing smaller incidents out of proportion. “First of all, we’ve got more air traffic all the time. I used to say we have 93,000 flights over the planet, commercial flights, every day; it’s actually more like 100,000 now, and as those increased, the possibility for incidents increases. But, we are hypersensitized in the media. Me too; I’m media, and we’re hypersensitized to anything happening. ‘Tire falls off’- well, it must be Boeing. No, it could be Airbus. ‘We’re going back to the gate’; that is not news, unless it’s something like, you know, like- we have to translate our terms- ‘We’ve got a bit of an issue with our petrochemical side of the operation’. That means we’re out of gas.”
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