"The High and the Mighty" is a novel which is notable on two counts—as an eminently entertaining addition both to one of the oldest and to one of the most recent branches of storytelling. The most recent is the literature of flight, of which the first-rate examples seem very few when it is remembered that the year 1953 will mark a full half century since Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the supposedly impossible at Kitty Hawk. But even if the literature of flight were considerably richer than it is, Mr. Gann's taut novel of the agony of a great four-engine plane which took off from Honolulu across the Pacific for San Francisco would command attention.

The other branch of story telling to which "The High and the Mighty" is an admirable addition is that which considers the lives of a disparate group of people, previously unacquainted with one...