The Flight of The Phoenix - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Pilot Frank Towns and navigator Lew Moran are ferrying a mixed bag of passengers out of the Jebel oil town of the Libyan desert, among them oil workers, a couple of British soldiers, and a German who was visiting his brother. An unexpected sandstorm forces the aircraft down, damaging the plane, killing two of the men, and severely injuring the German. In the book, the action takes place in the Libyan part of the Sahara.

The survivors wait for rescue but begin to worry, as the storm has blown them far off course, away from where searchers would look for them. After several days, Captain Harris marches toward a distant oasis together with another passenger. His aide Sergeant Watson feigns a sprained ankle and does not join Harris. A third man follows after them. Days later, Harris barely manages to return to the crash site. The others are lost.

As the water begins to run out Stringer, a precise, arrogant English aeronautical engineer, proposes a radical solution. He claims they can rebuild a new aircraft from the wreckage of the old twin-boom aircraft, using the undamaged boom and adding skids to take off. They set to work.

At one point they spot a party of nomadic tribesmen. Captain Harris decides to ask them for help, but Sergeant Watson refuses to accompany him. Instead another survivor, a Texan named Loomis, goes with him. The next day, Towns finds their looted bodies, throats cut, and the nomads gone.

Later, Towns finds out that Stringer's job is designing model aircraft, not real, full-scale ones. Afraid of the effect on morale, he and Moran keep their discovery secret, though they now believe Stringer's plan is doomed. However, they turn out to be wrong. The aircraft is reborn, like the mythical Phoenix. It flies the passengers, strapped to the outside of the fuselage, to an oasis and civilization.