Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421

Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 is a thriller novel by T. J. Newman about a commercial aircraft that crashes into the Pacific Ocean and sinks with 12 people trapped inside. The novel weaves a dual narrative that involves both the passengers trapped on board struggling to survive and the elite rescue team racing to save them. At the heart of this crisis is the Kent family: Will and his daughter, Shannon, are trapped on the aircraft, and Chris, Shannon’s mother and Will’s estranged wife, is working to save them. Newman, a former flight attendant, writes survival thrillers specifically about aviation; her debut novel, Falling, is also centered around a catastrophic airplane incident. Drowning is her second novel and was published in 2023. Newman’s two novels have received critical acclaim, and film adaptations are in the works for both.

This guide refers to the 2023 hardback edition published by Avid Reader Press.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss a plane crash and death.

Plot Summary

Drowning opens as engineer Will Kent and his 11-year-old daughter, Shannon, witness their plane’s engine explode a few minutes after takeoff. With the engine on fire, the pilots are forced to make an emergency landing on the water, a seldom-used emergency procedure called “ditching.” The plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii. Despite the impact, the plane is mostly intact, but the remaining engine explodes and causes a massive fire. Some passengers manage to evacuate onto life rafts, but many of them are caught in the blaze outside the plane. Will insists that the flight crew shut the doors and seal the remaining passengers inside; the fire and jet fuel make escaping the plane more dangerous than remaining on board. The flight crew complies, but the plane is not fully watertight. As water seeps into the plane, it sinks until it lands on a shallow underwater shelf.

Coast Guard commander Jackie “Fitz” Fitzgerald arrives at the crash site, where his team attempts to recover the few survivors on the water. One of the dive officers, Mikey Tanner, reports that they have located the plane, possibly with passengers still on board. Meanwhile, Chris—Will’s estranged wife and Shannon’s mother—is at work; she is a professional diver performing routine hull maintenance on a Navy ship. She and Will have a strained relationship because their daughter Annie died six years ago. Her work is interrupted when the Navy sailors are called to assist with a mass rescue operation for a commercial airline ditching. To Chris’s horror, the crashed aircraft is Will and Shannon’s.

The remaining 12 passengers on Flight 1421 have stopped sinking and have enough air to last a few hours. Kit Callahan, the pilot, assigns tasks to the others to keep everyone busy, and the group tries to figure out how to communicate with someone on the surface. Fitz and the Coast Guard rescue team deploy video recording devices to the crash site to look for signs of life on the plane. Chris slips into a meeting between the Coast Guard and Navy so that she can figure out what is happening and learns that the rescue module they need to save the passengers, called the Falcon, is broken and unusable. Chris insists on finding a way to fix it; she believes that the Coast Guard’s alternative plan to lift the plane will likely kill the passengers. Meanwhile, Kit finds and figures out how to use the air-to-ground phone, which allows her to communicate with a telemedicine specialist.

Chris and her team try to figure out how to attach the Falcon to the plane to get the passengers out, and Fitz and Tanner discuss the bleak state of victim recovery on the water. The recording devices have been deployed, and the cameras show the plane intact and the passengers alive inside. Additionally, Kit can now communicate with the rescue team via the MedLink phone. Both the passengers and the rescue team feel a sense of hope, but the camera pans out to reveal the plane’s precarious position on the edge of a cliff.

Will is anxious about the rescue plans, and when Kit tells him that they plan to lift the plane out with slings, Will asserts that this could rupture a weak spot on the aircraft and flood their air pocket, killing everyone on board. A woman’s voice on the other end of the line agrees with him, and Will realizes that it is Chris. He is immensely relieved, and Chris gets back to work trying to execute her own plan.

Fitz and the divers try to figure out how to move the plane given its structural damage. Attaching lift slings requires them to drill into the ocean floor under the plane, and a young diver named Runt operates the drill. However, the seafloor is weaker than the team anticipated, and part of it collapses. Runt sinks with it, blacks out from a lack of air, and falls into the sea below. The collapsing sea shelf causes the plane to tip forward, raising the water levels and causing the passengers to lose almost half their air. Fitz tells Chris that the mission failed. He empathizes with Chris because he has also lost a child, and he hesitantly decides to go forward with her plan.

Kit tells the passengers that Chris has a plan; they are skeptical, but Will has full faith in her. He regrets not connecting with Chris over their shared grief after Annie’s death. Chris and her team explain their plan: They will attach the Falcon to the plane’s roof and cut a hole through which the passengers can escape. The passengers need to remove the wires and insulation from the ceiling so that the Falcon can dock. Kit shuts off the power so that they can cut the wires safely, plunging the plane into darkness and cutting off communication with the surface. While cutting one of the wires, an elderly passenger, Ira, is electrocuted and dies.

The Navy comes up with a different plan: escorting the passengers out one by one by equipping them with watertight, full-body diving suits. The suits typically require extensive training, so both Chris and the passengers object. However, when one passenger escapes successfully using this method, they decide to continue with the plan. Everyone is more hopeful now. Chris and Will have an opportunity to talk; they apologize to one another, and Will feels more connected to her.

The next passenger who attempts the suit panics and dies on their ascent to the surface. The passengers refuse to continue with this plan, and Chris’s plan is set to commence. The divers level the plane by attaching a weighted cable to the tail. However, a storm is raging on the surface, and the waves cause the cable to move erratically. This damages the weakened seafloor below the plane. The Falcon docks, and all the passengers load in except for Ruth, an elderly woman who stays behind with Ira, her deceased husband. Chris and Sayid are detaching the Falcon when the shelf starts to collapse. The plane, with the rescue module attached, starts to fall further into the sea, and Chris chases after it. She manages to successfully cut the Falcon free from the plane, but a sharp piece of metal slices through the electrical line she is holding, shocking her. The passengers are brought up safely, but Chris is in poor shape. Will and the other passengers are brought to a decompression chamber to recover, and Fitz admits that Will and Chris were right about everything. Chris, in recovery at the hospital, hears Will’s voice and has a vision of Annie.

A year later, the survivors of Flight 1421 meet up again in Hawaii. They read notes that they wrote on board and connect over what happened. When Will and Shannon are driving home afterward, Shannon admits that she is somewhat glad for the crash because it brought Will back home. They arrive at their family home, where Chris greets them and embraces Will.