ARTHUR HAILEY was famous both for the reliance of his fiction on facts (hostile critics, of whom there were a few, called them factoids) and for the feature films that were made from his books. Airport, published in 1968, was perhaps the best known of these; it was made into an immensely successful movie and inspired several more on cognate subjects.

Hailey’s 11 books were published in 40 countries, and world sales to date have exceeded 170 million copies. A prodigious researcher, he always self-effacingly disclaimed any creative dimension to his books: “I don’t think I really invented anybody.” But this modest assessment ignored the sheer craft with which he assembled the results of his research, and the interest he was able to generate in the reader about the difficulties inherent in the professional lives he described, be they those of pilots, doctors, air traffic controllers, administrators or politicians.

Arthur Hailey was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, in 1920. His father, George Washington Hailey, was a factory storekeeper. Evidently, writing of some sort was always in Hailey’s blood, for he said that at the age of 10 he was already pestering local newspaper editors with rambling letters.

Educated at Surrey School, Luton, he excelled in the English that was taught there; but he could not understand mathematics, and so he failed to win the scholarship to a grammar school which all his teachers felt he was entitled. So he left school at 14.

He worked for a while at an estate agents, but was sacked for getting his sums wrong — and so drifted from job to job until 1939. He would compensate for his adolescent innumeracy with the understanding of figures and finance implicit in The Moneymakers (1975), a very successful story — for which he also wrote the film script — set in a fictitious American bank.

As soon as the Second World War broke out Hailey enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. He trained as a sergeant-pilot on fighters in Canada and the United States. By the end of the war he had become a flight lieutenant, had been given the Air Efficiency Award and had served in Europe, the Middle East where he flew fighter patrols, and the Far East. Among his other RAF jobs he was to become the first editor of an aircrew training magazine, Air Clues, at the Air Ministry.

But in London after the war had ended, he found himself bored and disillusioned by what he saw as unnecessary socialist constraints, quite apart from food and clothing shortages that were in marked contrast to his transatlantic experience. Demobilised in 1947, he emigrated in that year to Canada, a country whose hospitality and wide-openness he remembered fondly from his wartime training there. He became a Canadian citizen in 1952. He also held a commission as a flight lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Air Force Reserve.

His first work in Canada was as a salesman of real estate, but in 1949 his previous editorial experience landed him the apparently rather unpromising post of editor of a trade journal published by Maclean-Hunter, Bus and Truck Transport. In 1953, however (until 1956), he found more congenial employment as sales promotion manager of Canadian Trailmobile, a large firm of trailer manufacturers.

One night in 1955 Hailey had to make a flight on business from Toronto to Vancouver in an old Douglas DC4. What, he speculated idly, would happen if all the airline’s regular pilots were to become ill? He imagined himself, as a pilot familiar only with fighter controls, in the position of being forced to handle a passenger aircraft in trouble.

Excited, he went home and wrote a one-hour television play, Flight Into Danger, which was transmitted with great success in April 1956 in Canada, then in the US, and finally in Britain by the BBC. In 1958 Paramount filmed it as Zero Hour!, with a script co-written by Hailey, its director Hall Bartlett, and John Champion. As a writer he was now made. He had discovered a perfect formula — the nerve-racking drama played out against a background of meticulously researched fact.

With great business acumen, Hailey now set up an advertising agency, Hailey Publicity Services, with Trailmobile as his chief client. He needed time (and financial security) to write; but he proceeded with characteristic caution. At first he concentrated on American television, in which medium such thrillers as Time Lock, about a child trapped in a bank vault, were highly regarded. But Hailey owed his success as a novelist not only to his own skill but also to the enterprise of a young British publisher, Ernest Hecht, of Souvenir Press.

Hecht commissioned him and another writer, John Castle, to do a “novelisation” of Flight Into Danger. When this appeared in 1958 (and as Runway Zero-Eight in America in 1959), by John Castle and Arthur Hailey, it was an immediate success. Now Hailey took over this enterprise single-handed, “novelising” his television play No Deadly Medicine into The Final Diagnosis (1960). This was published by Souvenir Press in conjunction with Michael Joseph.

In High Places (1962), Hotel (1965), Airport (1968) and others followed, and Hailey did not look back. His own favourite, a commercial failure by comparison with his other titles — all of which were in varying degrees blockbusters — was In High Places, which speculated on the notion of a Canada trying to incorporate itself into the US as a result of menace from the Soviet Union.

It was with this book that Hailey turned decisively to fiction, or, as many have described it, “faction” — documentary fiction in which soapopera-style dramas reach their resolutions against a background so well researched that it has the atmosphere of actuality. With Wheels (1971), a tale of the Detroit automobile industry, Hailey entered into the select company of those popular authors who have made $1 million before publication.

Hailey’s methods became well known and much imitated. He would spend months interviewing people — from the highest to the lowest — who worked in the field he had chosen to fictionalise. He was a skilful interviewer who relied on memory, and who only made notes at the end of the day. Then he would compose his “faction” at the steady, though not great, rate of 500 words a day. Though his output had, by choice, slackened as he grew older, his last novel, Detective (1997) showed that he had lost none of his powers.

Hailey was unpretentious, and, unlike some authors of his kind, had no false sense of himself as a literary man. His sense of psychology was shrewd rather than subtle. But he was very good within his field, that of mass entertainment.

He lived in a millionaires’ enclave in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, in a house crammed with electronic gadgets, including a stand-by generator to ensure the constant temperature of his wine-cellar. He felt that the chief influences upon him had been George Bernard Shaw, W. Somerset Maugham and the Bible. But in spite of this last, he clung to his life-long agnosticism.

Hailey was twice married, first, in 1944 to Joan Fishwick, by whom he had three sons. The marriage was dissolved in 1950, and he married in 1951 Sheila Dunlop. They had a son and two daughters.

Arthur Hailey, novelist, was born on April 5, 1920. He died on November 24, 2004, aged 84.