On a picture-perfect afternoon in 1979, Chicago businessman Louis Blaine boards a DC-10 for a flight to Los Angeles. It's just a day trip: he plans to be home around midnight to his pregnant wife and his seven-year-old daughter.

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But thirty-one seconds after the plane becomes airborne, it falls from the sky. Engorged with jet fuel, the wide-body plane slams into the ground and explodes a mile from the airport. The earth quivers—the smoke is visible for miles—a few unfortunate people on the ground are killed—everyone aboard the DC-10 is dead.

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The picture-perfect day had become a gruesome nightmare, one from which no one in the family would ever awaken. But forty years later, the unborn son, Daniel, who has no idea how to make things right, decides to try anyway. He doesn't face the dangers of a doomed plane, but he finds danger he could never have foreseen.