Flight Plan

Jamie, 13, is returning on a flight from visiting his grandmother when his plane fails takeoff because of a disaster that appears to disable all technology with any computer processor at all, leaving humankind without most communication, transportation and other technologies. Joining the flight crew and several passengers, Jamie becomes part of an elaborate survival trek as they travel 1200 miles to rejoin their families. Led by the pilot, the talented and resourceful group travels through a post-apocalyptic landscape, using scavenged pre-computer vehicles, bicycles, and medical and food supplies, and encountering violent resistance from predatory gangs that have sprung up from the disarray. Jamie learns hard lessons about the difficult moral choices needed to keep the group alive as they lose members to violence and to generous survival colonies before reaching his parents in the neighborhood collective they have set up.

Written in response to fan requests for more books set in the world of the Rule of Three, Walters takes the maxim of human survival (three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food) and applies it to a thought experiment of what would happen if, without warning, the whole world was plunged into a pre-technology state. The result is both damning and hopeful, alternating between violence and cooperation. The group’s perilous trek is full of a large amount of both pluck and luck, with the good fortune to be joined (among others) by a doctor, a survivalist, a nurse, a pair of Olympic archers, and an airport technician, all teaching Jamie how to use strategy and weapons to survive and to outwit their predators. The contrast between cooperation and predation is ever-present in both the motley crews they meet and the lessons that the pilot attempts to teach Jamie.

But there are elements of the story that are less than satisfying. It is never quite clear how the group of ten arrive so quickly at the conclusion that going to their faraway homes is the right thing to do, and the coincidence that all live within the same area is hard to believe. Moreover, although the geographical location is clear at the start—Chicago O’Hare Airport—the generic town names (Eden Mills, Milton, etc) that the group are from are never placed in any particular state or province (although a search reveals towns of those names in Vermont, about 1000 miles away), nor is the airport they were heading to ever identified. The reaction of people around them to the disaster is depicted in great detail, but the possible cause (the hypothesis about computer processors, learned from short-wave radio) is never explored in any meaningful way.

In addition, although a happy ending is not expected, readers will be disappointed that the story ends with Jamie’s settling in for what may be a long survival haul with his family and their neighbours. The moral lessons, sprinkled through experience and the pilot’s philosophical comments each time an adversary dies so that they can go on, never quite explain the difficulty of maintaining civilized standards while competing for survival. The miracle of their survival and their long voyage is on occasion hard to believe, in particular the electric airplane staircase that they use to carry their belongings for much of the trip, charging its batteries with a generator fed by gasoline siphoned from abandoned cars.

Still, the story in Flight Plan is engrossing, and Jamie’s relationship with his travelling companions demonstrates the ties that bind in difficult times. The addition of Godzilla, a loyal and tough dog that is discovered in the airplane cargo and that defends and hunts for the group, adds an element that tugs at the heartstrings, especially when Jamie has to give up the dog so that the group can live. But, overall, the story seems too long, adding one more marauding gang challenge after another, almost too bleak and plaintive for its own good. Readers will long for a satisfying conclusion, good or bad, that never seems to come. A serviceable book, but not among Walters’ best.