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 flew 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 crews. Overall, an indescribably fascinating book.