A Hollywood screenwriter cranked out Before the Fall, a novel concerning some rich people who crash in a chartered 9-seat jet out of Martha’s Vineyard. As befits a Hollywood-derived work, the characters are generally either rich or recovering alcoholics:
Studying Doug’s back, Scott wonders how much money the boy stands to inherit from his parents. Five million? Fifty? His father ran a TV empire and flew in private planes. There will be riches, real estate. Sniffling, Doug hikes up his pants with both hands. He pulls a small toy car from his pocket. It still has the price tag on it. “Here you go, slugger,” he says. “Got this for you.” There are a lot of sharks in the sea, thinks Scott, watching the boy take the car.
The things money can’t buy, goes the famous quote, you don’t want anyway. Which is bullshit, because in truth there is nothing money can’t buy. Not really. Love, happiness, peace of mind. It’s all available for a price. The fact is, there’s enough money on earth to make everyone whole, if we could just learn to do what any toddler knows—share. But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket
At twenty-nine, Leslie Mueller is the sole heir to a technology empire. The daughter of a billionaire (male) and a runway model (female), she is a member of an ever-growing genetically engineered master race. They are everywhere these days, it seems, the moneyed children of brilliant capitalists, using a fraction of their inheritances to launch companies and fund the arts. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, they buy impossible real estate in New York, Hollywood, London. They set themselves up as a new Medici class, drawn to the urgent throb of the future. They are something beyond hip, collectors of genius, winging from Davos to Coachella to Sundance, taking meetings, offering today’s artists, musicians, and filmmakers the seductive ego stroke of cash and the prestige of their company. Beautiful and rich, they don’t take no for an answer.
The woman in back, on the other hand, who told him to keep the change from a twenty, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and owned nineteen televisions she didn’t watch. Once upon a time she was a doctor’s daughter in Brookline, Massachusetts, a girl who grew up riding horses and got a nose job for her sixteenth birthday.
The book goes off the rails when it comes to aviation:
They started him as a copilot. This was September 2013. He loved the luxury jets, loved the clients he served—billionaires and heads of state. It made him feel important. But what he really loved was the grade-A, top-shelf pussy working the main cabin. Goddamn, he thought the first time he saw the flight crew he’d be working with.
Under normal conditions it is a twenty-nine-minute flight. Less than a short hop. There will be a six-minute lull before they are in range of Teterboro ATC
He stepped out of the cockpit. The crew bathroom was right next to the cockpit.
He had a few hours to kill before his next flight, a quick jog over to Martha’s Vineyard to pick up a payload of six. For this flight he’d pilot an OSPRY 700SL. He hadn’t flown the particular model before, but he wasn’t worried. OSPRY made a very capable airplane. Still, as he sat in the crew lounge waiting, he read up on the specs.
It’d do Mach .083, though he’d never push it that hard with paying passengers aboard. It’d fly coast-to-coast on a full tank at a top speed of 554 mph. The specs said it topped out at forty-five thousand feet, but he knew from experience that that was a cautious number. He could take it up to fifty thousand feet without incident, though he couldn’t imagine needing to on this flight.
On Friday, August 21, she flew from Frankfurt to London on a Learjet 60XR. It was her and Chelsea Norquist, a gap-toothed blonde from Finland, in the main cabin. [Note that a stripped Lear 60 has a full-fuel payload of 1068 lbs, so two flight attendants and their bags would consume about 30 percent of the payload.]
The plot critically depends on a 9-seat business jet having an armored flight deck door and a flight attendant. Planes that are used for short regional flights are also used to go on intercontinental trips. Small business jets have multiple flight attendants (the second flight attendant is required by the FAA when there are more than 50 passenger seats), dedicated crew bathrooms (like a 747?), and a “main cabin”. Pilots fly new-to-them turbojets without getting a type rating (training specific to that model of jet). Teterboro Tower controls airspace halfway to Martha’s Vineyard.
I can’t figure out why publishers and/or authors wouldn’t get one of America’s 500,000+ pilots to review and correct a manuscript like this. Perhaps nobody cares (i.e., the books still sell) and if you just assume that really the plane they were flying was a Boeing Business Jet then potentially it could make some sense.
I had the same reaction on the plane. In the very first chapter when they have just boarded the plane, its says one man walks up to the other and greets him, both standing up. In the 9-seat private jets I have flown on, you are usually crouched over (at least a little) as you make your way to your seat, and it is very difficult to stand face-to-face with another passenger. I am thinking of Citations. And, of course, there is never a flight attendant and you can lean in and talk to the pilots anytime – no door.
– “But what he really loved was the grade-A, top-shelf pussy working the main cabin.”
Well, he at least got that right. I fly with my cats all the time.
The novelist hasn’t sold enough books yet to cover a NetJets card. By the time his movie deal comes through, it’ll be too late to fix the plot.
“The book goes off the rails when it comes to aviation:”
I’m no pilot, but I’d say the train left the rails well before he even started talking about planes, judging by your exert.
Of course, if art more closely imitated real life, we might call it life instead of art.
This is known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
It’s not a bad read, but like a lot of quickies, it has a hurried wrap-up and end. Three stars tops.