Robert Serling, novelist

Robert J. Serling, one of the nation's top aviation writers and the author of the best-selling novel "The President's Plane Is Missing," has died. He was 92.

Serling, the older brother of "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, died May 6 in a hospice facility in Tucson, Ariz., said his wife, Patricia Hoyer. He had been diagnosed with cancer five days earlier.

The former award-winning aviation writer for United Press International, Serling became UPI's aviation editor in Washington, D.C., in 1960, the same year his first book, "The Probable Cause: The Truth About Air Travel Today," was published.

While at UPI in the early 1960s, Serling was at Andrews Air Force Base waiting for the arrival of the president on Air Force One. During his wait, he began wondering how the headline would read if the plane never arrived.

"The President's Plane Is Missing," his 1967 Cold War thriller about the vice president having to take over after Air Force One mysteriously disappears during a routine flight with the president on board, enabled Serling to quit UPI and write books full time.

Serling said he never felt overshadowed by his more famous brother, who died in 1975 at age 50.

"We never did compete," he said in the 1991 interview. "Our careers really took different paths. He wrote for television; I wrote for print. But I think he was prouder than hell of me and I was prouder than hell of him."

After earning a bachelor's degree in political science from Antioch College in Ohio in 1942, he served in the Army as an instructor in aircraft identification during World War II.

He joined UPI in 1945.