Fate is the Hunter

Man was not meant to fly.

No, seriously. Planes just want to fall out of the sky and kill us all, and yet we still go up.

Gann chronicles his experiences as a pilot in the early days of airline travel (late 1930s), through air transit command during WW2, and the travails of starting a new airline to Hawaii. He writes lyrically about the beauty of flight, the recalcitrance of machines, and the cruelties of fate that separate one man's survival from the deaths of dozens of his comrades-crashed into mountains, iced up and brought down, slain by unexplained mechanical failure. Gann fly everywhere from the high arctic to the jungles of Brazil, at the controls of good-natured DC-3 and C-87 liberators that seemed to have a will to kill their show more crews. Overall, an indescribably fascinating book. show less

Say what you will about this book, but Gann sure knows how to tell a fish story. While a lesser author would have made this book unbelievably boring, Gann was able to keep me captivated even though he essentially told the same tale again and again.

What surprised me the most about this book is just how many airline pilots died in the early years of commercial aviation. If anywhere near the number of fatal accidents occurred in commercial aviation today as did back then, there wouldn't be a commercial airline industry anymore.

A fantastic pilot's memoir. The stories are unbelievable. Dealing with icing, flying to Reykjavik, rescuing a downed crew in the Canadian wilderness, flying the Hump to China,… "Did you know we grounded every DC-4 in the world because of you?" The descriptions and the characterizations are also good.

"Even as I watch the ice accumulates… It builds upon itself, decreasing the size of the opening like a closing iris until it is merely a black hole, hardly more than the size of a dollar… Our engines are simply suffocating. Something must remove the ice before it closes the mouths entirely… By backfiring the engines a tongue of flame spurts from the air scoops. It is not the flame but the force of air from the bowels of the engine show more which knocks away the closing ice."

"The only way the true speed of an aeroplane may be visually appreciated is to fly it close to a relatively stationary surface. In barnstorming days we frequently sought this same exhilaration by skimming over the fields and trees, even following the contours of hills as closely as we dared. It was, at least, a stimulating prelude to disaster which was all too frequently the end result. Such gay foolishness in an airliner is, of course, unthinkable, but the same effect can be achieved by finding a flat-topped deck of cloud and flying along its surface until the bottom arc of the propellers slice into it. This is a harmless diversion and when, as now, a moon illuminates a great mattress of vapour, the effect is intoxicating." show less

A bit florid for my taste, I swear the author doesn't give you any clear idea of the time period of the book at the beginning. Just cockpit this, steely gaze that.

The author has such a descriptive way of writing that you easily inhabit the various cockpits and join his crew. i haven't read such immersive writing in a long time.

Breathtaking and very affecting. Ernest K Gann was a great writer. I never expected this subject to be so adventurous or such compelling reading. He evokes wonderfully the early era of commercial aviation and the supply lines kept open during the Second World War. I read the final pages of the epilogue - as he describes his veteran co-pilot - as some kind of future realisation of his own self to come. The book's title says it all.

A gripping and fascinating account of flying before GPS and before even radio beacons. The best book on flying ever; every pilot I've spoken to has read it.