Bob Serling, older brother of the late Rod Serling, has written 23 books, including the best-seller "The President's Plane Is Missing." He currently is writing a history of Alaska Airlines.

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He went through commercial pilot training but never flew as a licensed pilot.

He went through flight attendant school, too — all in the name of research.

"But I didn't count on Eastern making me work a flight," says aviation writer Bob Serling.

He is not kidding. "I was assigned to first class, where I dropped all the silverware and served a martini to a teetotaler."

The author of 23 books — including the mega-best-seller "The President's Plane Is Missing" — Serling is still at it, now toiling over the history of Alaska Airlines.

"I've got 6 million words transcribed," says Serling, who must boil it all down to, oh, 300,000 snippets or so before next May's publication date.

At least he's no longer pounding the keys of a manual typewriter, something he did for his first 20 books.

"I love my Apple," says Serling, darting around his cluttered office on Tucson's Northwest Side.

Oh, did we mention he's 88? Or that he's the older brother of the late Rod Serling, yet another prolific writer and host of the early-1960s sci-fi TV show "The Twilight Zone"?

"I worked with Rod on two scripts," says Serling. One aired on the late-1950s drama series "Playhouse 90," the other on "The Twilight Zone."

Naturally, both had to do with airplanes. Bob Serling supplied the plot for one, the cockpit dialogue for the other, "The Odyssey of Flight 33," which aired on "The Twilight Zone."

"Bless his heart, he gave me screen credit as technical adviser," says Serling about the brother he lost in 1975 to a heart attack.

"He had my father's genes," says Serling, who clearly does not.

A wiry dynamo, Serling credits his love of airplanes — and an inferiority complex — for steering him into a career that's now spanned seven decades.

"I was 5-foot-6 and wore these thick, tortoiseshell glasses," says Serling. "My heroes from boyhood were pilots and sports figures. I was never going to be one. The only way in life I could be with these people I admired was to write about them."

By 1942, he was working in Cleveland as night bureau manager for United Press, which had yet to tack "International" onto its name.

Determined to enlist during World War II, he was kept stateside by the Army due to bad eyesight. Already an expert on the subject, he instead taught aircraft identification.

"I spent the whole damn war in Texas," says Serling.

After the war, he went right back to UP, first in Cleveland, then in Washington, D.C., where he covered the Washington Redskins and also served as manager of UP's radio news bureau. "We wrote copy for the ear, rather than the eye," he says.

A 1947 plane crash into a mountain catapulted him into aviation writing. "No one else could go. It was the first crash I ever covered."

On the scene, he found a pocketbook with a receipt for a wedding gown. "It belonged to one of the flight attendants."

Yes, of course, that made it into the story. But Serling was also interested in the "whys" of airplane crashes.

In 1960, the same year he became full-time aviation editor for what was by then UPI, he wrote his first book, "The Probable Cause," which explored how and why airliners crash.

A dozen more nonfiction books on aviation would follow, including the histories of several airlines.

One was on TWA and its one-time owner, Howard Hughes.

"I did meet Howard Hughes and shake his hand," says Serling. "He was already wearing gloves."

Serling's also written several novels, including "The President's Plane Is Missing," which was later made into a 1973 movie starring Buddy Ebsen.

The idea for the plot, which involves the crash of Air Force One, came to him one day after covering the routine departure of the president's plane at Andrews Air Force Base.

"I kept thinking, 'If such a thing would happen, what words would I use for a flash at UPI?' I got it down to, 'The President's Plane Is Missing.' Holy cow. What a title."

His editor at Doubleday thought so, too, advancing him the equivalent of a year's salary at UPI, provided he quit and write the book.

Burned out by then, Serling agreed. The book, he says, made it to No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list and went through 26 paperback printings.

His favorite book, however, remains the much-lesser-known "She'll Never Get Off the Ground."

"It's about a woman airline pilot when there were none," says Serling, who endured six weeks of flight training at a Boeing 737 school for pilots.

Ostracized at first by the "real" pilots, he soon won over the class after acing the first test. "It was all on everything I already knew," he says.

Today, he still gets calls from strangers needing to extract aviation facts and figures.

"I got a call just the other day from a travel writer. She wanted to know when the first inflight movie was shown.

"It was in 1925, the original 'The Lost World,' a silent film, shown on a British Imperial Airlines flight, London to Paris."

Yes, of course. Was there ever any doubt?