Back in 1978 my dad went to visit his publisher and, as usual, brought home a couple of soon-to-be-published books they'd given him. One of them was by a chap named Brian Lecomber, a pilot, called Talk Down; and it was about exactly the scenario that film was supposed to be about: a non-flyer in a light aircraft, an incapacitated pilot, and people trying to get them down safely.
I thought it was very good, but it hadn't occurred to me before that one of the things that made it good was that it devoted its content solely to getting them in the air then accurately recounting the tricky business of getting them safely down again, rather than going off on tangents about one of them getting a job in marketing about a year before they boarded the plane and so on
Lecomber doesn't appear to have a Wikipedia page, but somebody blogged about that book and a couple of others: Brian Lecomber: Three Novels. He only has an image of the paperback, but this is a photo from some bookselling site showing the cover of the hardback first edition my dad was given by Hodder & Stoughton:
I thought it was very good, but it hadn't occurred to me before that one of the things that made it good was that it devoted its content solely to getting them in the air then accurately recounting the tricky business of getting them safely down again, rather than going off on tangents about one of them getting a job in marketing about a year before they boarded the plane and so on
Lecomber doesn't appear to have a Wikipedia page, but somebody blogged about that book and a couple of others: Brian Lecomber: Three Novels. He only has an image of the paperback, but this is a photo from some bookselling site showing the cover of the hardback first edition my dad was given by Hodder & Stoughton:
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