High above the Rocky Mountains, a routine airline flight becomes a midair standoff as 130 passengers listen to their captain relate the unprecedented demands of an unseen hijacker. Federal and state officials must hunt down, arrest, and indict the murderer of a young girl, and do it all in eight hours - or the airplane will be blown out of the sky.

Veteran pilot Clark Maxwell thought his fire bombing days were well behind him. But when Jerry Stein, Maxwell's friend and air tanker fleet-owner, calls at the height of the fire season to beg him to reenter the war, he doesn't hesitate. As the wildfires spread, whipped by massive winds and the federal forces arrayed against the fires reach their limits, hysteria and potential evacuation threatens the local population.

For 30-year-old captain Scott McKay, the transport run from Miami to Denver will give him the money he desperately needs to keep his fledgling air cargo company flying. When a mysterious crate is discovered on his plane, however, McKay is ordered to abandon his present course and fly the crate and its owner, Vivian Henry, to Washington, D.C., before going to Denver. It is discovered that the crate contains a thermonuclear bomb, one capable of destroying every computer chip over an entire continent.

The passengers of Meridian Flight Six - delayed for hours and mistreated by rude and inept airline personnel - have been pushed to the edge. When Captain Phil Knight makes a forced emergency landing in war-torn Nigeria, abandoning his co-pilot to certain death, violence erupts inside the airplane as the enraged passengers attempt the first-ever commercial airline mutiny. But what they don't know could kill them.

Minutes after a Boeing 747 rises majestically into a Hong Kong sunset, a flash splits the darkening sky. The pilot - suddenly blinded and doubled over in pain - fumbles in the dark in a frantic effort to gain control as the huge jet shudders through its descent. Kat Bronsky, FBI agent and terrorism specialist, is assigned the hunt for a Challenger-class business jet seen nearby just before the incident.