TRACON

TRACON

Winner of the 2001 Ippy Award
Bronze medal for the 2001 Book of the Year Award
2001 Benjamin Franklin Award finalist

â€œThe air traffic control world is off-limits to most of you and, consequently, often misunderstood. This book accomplishes what many media accounts, newspaper articles, magazine treatments, and movies have tried and failed to do: get into the minds of the men and women who are responsible for more lives in an hour than most surgeons are in a lifetime. "TRACON" is a fictionalized account so accurate and chilling in its realism that it strikes people in the aviation business as a narrative summary of actual events.â€

â€” JOHN S. CARR, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS ASSOCIATION

JACKET COPY
Thousands of lives hover in the skies above Chicago. An average day in the TRACON for air traffic con-troller Ryan Kelly. Cool and confident, he juggles airliners like a casino dealer shuffles cards from the dark vantage of the radar room at Oâ€™Hare Airport. Thereâ€™s just one problem. A billion-dollar one. Kelly fears the airlinesâ€™ coveted collision avoidance system will cause the very midair itâ€™s supposed to prevent. When peculiar readouts flash across his scope, two jets tangle over Lake Michigan and several hundred people die, propelling Kelly into the political and public crosshairs. Evidence vanishes. Hidden forces sabotage his reputation. His tightly coiled world spins out of control. Thereâ€™s only one way to clear his name and expose the renegade computer . . . but at great peril to the one he loves.

From Publishers Weekly
Originally published last year in a paperback edition, which quickly became the favorite book of pilots and air traffic controllers (although probably not of nervous airplane travelers), McElroy's fascinating, frightening saga of the events surrounding a horrific midair collision is being reissued in a "Commemorative Edition" in hardcover to mark the 20th anniversary of the disastrous Professional Air Traffic Controllers' strike the one the Reagan administration settled by firing everyone. Journalist McElroy's novel is, as he admits in a new afterword, largely a work of nonfiction lots of solid reporting, with some fictional elements added. It's also a very persuasive argument against the giant computer early warning system called TCAS (Traffic-Alert/Collision Avoidance System), which is supposed to take over automatically when planes get too close. As McElroy's hero traffic controller extraordinaire Ryan Kelly, the cool-as-a-cucumber whiz who works the titular underground room where most of the heavy lifting gets done knows, TCAS can't be relied on. Nor should we trust the FAA and the politicians who grease their own runways with that agency's bounty. McElroy surrounds Kelly with a vivid cast of seasoned controllers (and one newbie who sees the job as being akin to "tending a group of wind-up toys, all buzzing in different directions") and journalists, one the daughter of a powerful, devious senator who has his own reasons for keeping the facts about the midair crash out of the papers. This is great page-turning fun with the added punch of social and economic importance. (Aug. 3)Forecast: As a commemorative hardcover edition, this thriller will likely appeal most to air traffic controllers and aviation buffs (many of whom may already have picked it up in paperback). If word gets out to general readers, however, the market may broaden. McElroy will appear at a few major aviation events, as well as at Seattle's Bookfest Northwest.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

REVIEWS
"Must read for anyone who flies." -- â€”New York Times Best-selling author Clive Cussler

"Makes you feel like you're right there in the radar room." â€” Greensboro News & Record (NC)

"Difficult to put down even at 2 AM" â€” United Airlines Capt. Dwight Lubich

"TRACON was so attached to my face, my wife kept asking if Tom Clancy had come out with a new book." â€” Scott Spangler, Sport Aviation
Country USA
Manufacturer Japphire Inc
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2001-06-15
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Japphire Inc
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2001-06-15
Format	Kindle eBook

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