Tracon

“The 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.”

— JOHN S. CARR, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS ASSOCIATION

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 O’Hare Airport.

There’s just one problem. A billion-dollar one. Kelly fears the airlines’ coveted collision avoidance system will cause the very midair it’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. There’s only one way to clear his name and expose the renegade computer . . . but at great peril to the one he loves.