TRACON Award-winning Aviation Thriller

When Technology goes too far...

     Thousands of lives hover in the skies above Chicago. An average day in the TRACON for air traffic controller 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.

Little Known Facts About TRACON

•  The FAA kicked the author out of O’Hare Airport while he
    was researching TRACON.

•  All of the humorous vignettes in the book that describe the
    characters’ lives as controllers actually occurred.

•  TRACON is so real that pilots and aviation professionals use
    the book as a training tool.

•  The air disaster in TRACON takes place over Lake
    Michigan and is based on several real-life incidents.

•  Controllers think TRACON so authentically captures the
    essence of their profession—and the personality of the
    people who work the scopes—that their national union
    asked the author to write a book about its history.

Vividly Captures Controllers’ World
“	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

Commemorative Edition

     Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the air traffic controllers’ strike on August 3, 2001, Japphire published a commemorative hardcover edition of TRACON. The hardcover contains additional nonfiction content about aviation’s unsung heroes, their past struggles and emerging concerns.
     In the foreword, John S. Carr, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, discusses the aftershocks of the strike—in which President Reagan fired more than 11,000 workers for walking off the job—paints a colorful description of the personality profiles of controllers, and outlines pitfalls and suggested solutions to gridlock in the skies.
     In the afterword, Paul McElroy discusses emerging problems facing our nation’s air traffic control system while labor management scholar Rebecca Pels Lust offers a critical assessment of the causes behind the PATCO strike.

“Riveting from beginning to end.”

When Technology goes too far...

Little Known Facts About TRACON

Vividly Captures Controllers’ World

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”

Commemorative Edition

“Riveting from
beginning to end.”