Fate Is the Hunter: A Pilot's Memoir

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

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epilogue - as he describes his veteran co-pilot as some kind of future realisation of himself to come. The book's title says it all.

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Winged prose of the late 1930s and early 1940s -- part autobiography, part a chronicle of courage; and always about the workings of fate. Our skydiver, salutation "Blue Sky; Black Death" Echos Gann's refrain.

I write that we skydivers, "notice that the quality/quantity of people getting killed by

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impact appeared random... good skydivers and bad skydivers both bounced about as high. We noticed that it was not that He screwed up but rather that fate is the hunter and there is a real element of chance in skydiving." Pat Works '96

Collected reviews agree: ""Ernest K. Gann’s classic memoir is an up-close and thrilling account of the treacherous early days of commercial aviation. In his inimitable style, Gann brings you right into the cockpit, recounting both the triumphs and terrors of pilots who flew when flying was anything but routine.

The New Yorker > "This book is an episodic log of some of the more memorable of [the author's] nearly ten thousand hours aloft in peace and (as a member of the Air Transport Command) in war. It is also an attempt to define by example his belief in the phenomenon of luck -- that "the pattern of anyone fate is only partly contrived by the individual."

Saturday Review "This fascinating, well-told autobiography is a complete refutation of the comfortable cliché that "man is master of his fate." As far as pilots are concerned, fate (or death) is a hunter who is constantly in pursuit of them....

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Mostly biographical recounting by a professional pilot of the thrill (and terrors) of flying. Inspired a 1964 movie that wasn't terrible, but had little to do with the book.

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

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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 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."

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Very wordy, can skip paragraphs or even pages and still get the tale.Could not hold my interest.

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.