The thriller Falling was written by former US cabin crew member TJ Newman, who worked for Virgin America and Alaska Airlines.

The novel centres on a crowded flight from Los Angeles to New York. The pilot’s family has been kidnapped; the passengers are unaware. To save them, the pilot must crash the plane.

Arizona-based Ms Newman said she came up with the idea during a shift while passengers were sleeping, and wrote most of the book during cross-country red-eye flights.

“I’m looking out at the passengers and it’s quiet and it’s dark and it occurred to me at that moment how vulnerable the passengers were at the hands of the two men who were flying the plane,” she said during a recent telephone interview with Associated Press.

The book will be published by Simon & Schuster imprint Avid Reader Press and will come out in July.

The former flight attendant, who quit her job when she got the contract, has already started work on her second novel.

Ms Newman isn’t the only flight crew to do something completely different.

While many of them were unemployed or furloughed, four per cent of pilots said they had decided to leave the industry altogether and do something completely different.