<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">A ferret running loose through first class. A woman with a live octopus in her carry-on luggage. Food fights. Drunken brawls. Lecherous pilots.

Prostitutes in the lavatories. Elliott Hester has seen it all during the 16 years he's worked as a flight attendant for a major airline. And he has taken good notes.

The result is "Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant's Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet," which has just been published by St. Martin's Press. Hester, 43, is a consummate storyteller, as regular readers of his monthly "Out of the Blue" column in these pages can attest. Recently I asked him about what really goes on inside those thin tubes of metal hurtling through the stratosphere.</font>