Novelist learns how to escape a flooded, sinking airplane

By Susan Dunne -

When veteran novelist Chris Bohjalian began to write “The Night Strangers,” he knew how he wanted to plot the story.

He had two inspirations and plenty of material for a good, spooky narrative — about witchcraft in a small town — that linked those inspirations together.

There was one twist he wanted to include that he didn’t know a lot about: What a person had to do to emerge, alive, from a plane crash. Bohjalian’s novel (Crown Publishers, $25), which hit the bookstores last month, tells the story of Chip Linton, an airline pilot who is forced to crash-land on Lake Champlain.

Thirty-nine people die. Traumatized and obsessed with the crash and the deceased, Chip retires to rural New Hampshire, where even more frightening experiences await him, his wife and their twin daughters.

“I always do a lot of research for my books. I talked to pilots, shamans, herbalists. One thing I couldn’t get from interviews was what it is like to be in a plane underwater that’s flooding,” Bohjalian said.

“I remember that great old movie ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ where Richard Gere did training in a dunk tank.

I figured they must still have them to train aviators.” So to actually experience what it was like to be sitting in a plane that crashes into water, unhook his seat belt, get to an airplane door, open the door and swim out of the rapidly sinking fuselage, Bohjalian turned to Survival Systems USA in Groton, Conn.

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