Steve Coonts: A Conversation with Stephen Coonts

It is a riveting tale of aerial combat that unfolds at supersonic speed, but Stephen Coonts' best-selling novel Flight of the Intruder was actually a long time coming. Stories from missions he had flown and sensations he remembered from the cockpit remained with him through years spent driving taxis and slogging through law school. In fact, it would be more than a decade before he wrote his fictional account of a frustrated bomber crew and their unauthorized mission against Hanoi, North Vietnam.

Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a coal-mining town on the western slope of the Appalachian Mountains. Upon graduation from college, he was commissioned in the U.S. Navy and began flight training in Pensacola, Florida. He received his Navy wings in 1969 and made two combat cruises aboard the USS Enterprise during the final years of the Vietnam War. After the war, he served as a flight instructor on A-6 aircraft for two years. Coonts left active duty in 1977 and earned a law degree, working for an oil company until the runaway success of Flight of the Intruder in 1986 allowed him to write full time.

His work is relentlessly current, propelling Intruder hero Jake Grafton and other characters through stories fueled by technology and today's headlines. Biological warfare, top-secret spy planes, and political intrigue send Grafton and company on adventures all over the globe, but what sets Coonts apart from other writers of military fiction is his passion for the details of airplanes and his love for aviation and the wonder of flight

Coonts is the author of 14 New York Times bestsellers and editor of several anthologies of classic aerial fiction. He and his wife, Deborah, reside in Colorado Springs, Colorado.