If you’ve followed Cordell Logan across the pages of my mystery novels, you’ve probably noticed something early on: Logan can’t turn off his pilot brain. Even when he’s nowhere near the cockpit of the Ruptured Duck—his aging but stubbornly reliable airplane—he’s mentally scanning, evaluating, cross-checking, and trying to stay three steps ahead of whatever might go wrong next. It’s a habit that saves his life outright in Flat Spin, nearly costs him in Deep Fury, and quietly governs the way he moves through danger in Voodoo Ridge, Hot Start, The Kill Circle, and The Three-Nine Line.
Readers sometimes ask why Logan is a flight instructor rather than a conventional detective. Why not make him a an ex-cop, or former government special operator? The answer is that I wanted him to be unique, and being a pilot is at at his core. Flying shapes how he thinks, how he handles pressure, and how he interprets incomplete information. It turns out pilots make surprisingly good detectives. The cognitive overlap is real.
Situational Awareness: Flying the Situation, Not Just the Airplane
Every pilot learns early that your first priority is that when everything is falling apart, first things first: just fly the airplane. But you also fly the situation. Weather, terrain, traffic, systems, fuel, airspace, radio chatter, and your own mental state all compete for attention. Miss one variable and the whole picture can unravel.
Logan lives inside that mindset. He enters rooms the way a pilot enters unfamiliar airspace—quietly, alertly, taking in what doesn’t announce itself. In Voodoo Ridge, this is how he realizes a seemingly cooperative character is anything but: not because of what’s said, but because the surrounding details don’t align. It’s the narrative equivalent of flying into air that feels wrong before the instruments confirm it.
That instinct mirrors real flying. I once descended toward a small mountain airport as visibility steadily degraded, making constant micro-adjustments—airspeed, descent rate, terrain clearance—without panic, just processing. Logan processes the same way. He doesn’t label it situational awareness. He simply knows when something is off.
Checklists: Discipline as a Survival Tool
One of aviation’s most important inventions wasn’t a faster engine or better avionics. It was the checklist.
Pilots use checklists obsessively: before takeoff, in cruise, on approach, during emergencies. They aren’t a crutch; they’re an acknowledgment that human memory degrades under stress.
Logan doesn’t carry a literal checklist, but that mentality governs his investigations. In The Kill Circle, when multiple explanations appear equally plausible, he refuses to lunge toward the most dramatic theory. Instead, he works methodically—timelines, motives, opportunity—until one detail refuses to reconcile. That’s the detective version of a warning light on the instrument panel that shouldn’t be on.
I’ve been grateful for that discipline myself. Taxiing out not long ago from a high-altitude desert airfield after refueling, a minor anomaly during my engine run-up forced me to stop, recheck, and shut down. Mechanics later confirmed a problem that could have ended badly had I ignored it. Aviation teaches you that small oversights become catastrophic quickly. Logan understands that truth at a cellular level.
Risk Assessment: Quiet Paranoia Done Right
Good pilots operate with quiet paranoia—not fear, but the assumption that stuff happens and systems fail. So they constantly build margins. They plan exit strategies. They assume today’s calm may not last.
Logan carries that mindset everywhere. In The Three-Nine Line, he repeatedly survives situations that look manageable on the surface because he never trusts surface calm. He anticipates escalation. He assumes someone is lying. He prepares for the moment when things turn sideways—because flying has taught him they often do.
By the time Logan reaches The Impossible Turn—the eighth novel in the series, debuting in spring 2026—that instinct is no longer just a habit; it’s a necessity. The margins are thinner. The consequences of misjudgment are steeper. The question he has always asked—What am I missing?—becomes less abstract and more existential. It’s no longer about avoiding trouble. It’s about choosing which risks can be survived at all.
Pattern Recognition: The Skill You Can’t Fake
Flying is, at its core, pattern recognition. Engines have normal sounds. Airplanes feel a certain way at rotation. Weather behaves in recognizable moods. After enough time aloft, you sense trouble before you can articulate it.
Logan’s investigations run on the same principle. In Deep Fury, he notices behavioral inconsistencies—hesitations, over-rehearsed reactions, details offered too quickly—that mirror the way a pilot notices an engine running just slightly rough. His gut isn’t mystical. It’s trained.
By the time of The Impossible Turn, those patterns arrive faster and collide harder. There’s less time to analyze and fewer clean readouts. Logan is forced to rely not just on pattern recognition, but on judgment honed over years of near-misses—both in the air and on the ground.
The Mindset That Keeps Him Alive
Cordell Logan isn’t an effective detective because he’s brilliant or fearless. He’s effective because he brings a pilot’s brain into situations where most people bring instinct alone. He’s structured without rigidity, skeptical without cynicism, disciplined without losing adaptability.
Those traits define the best pilots I’ve known—and they define the best fictional detectives, too.
Which is why Logan, even when firmly on the ground, is never really done flying. The cockpit just follows him wherever he goes. And eventually, it asks him to make a turn he’s spent a lifetime preparing for.