From traffic control to Customs hall, from the airport manager's office to lay-over apartments in `Stewardesses' Row' the rooms are filled with men and women whose private pressures and passions match the fury of the blizzard that sweeps across the runways outside... For seven hours of suspense, a blocked runway, suicide, pickets, an aerial stowaway, pregnancy, smuggling, mass demonstrations, and a psychotic with his home-made bomb build to a nail-biting climax...

Arthur Hailey was born in 1920 at Luton, where he attended school, then worked as an office boy and clerk. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined Force and rose through the ranks to become a pilot and Flight Lieutenant. In 1974 he emigrated to Canada successively a real-estate salesman, business-magazine editor and a sales and advertising executive. He became a full-time author in 1956 following the overnight success of his television play 'Flight into Danger' which was performed worldwide, later becoming a novel and a film. In his long career as a novelist he wrote eleven novels which have been published in twenty-seven languages. Arthur Hailey died on November 24, 2004.