How 'good fortune' helped aviator Ernest Gann escape near-death
The pilot's memoir, Fate Is the Hunter, is a nail-biting account of his flying days
*Originally published on November 28, 2022.
Ernest Gann was old school. As a young pilot, he donned a leather helmet, goggles, and white silk scarf, and flew sightseers in his biplane for a couple of bucks a ride.
By 1938, the fledgling American Airlines had hired him as a co-pilot.
For the next 15 years he flew everywhere and everything. Passengers. Air mail. War supplies to combat zones and wounded soldiers back home. When there were no maps or radio signals, he navigated by the stars. He loved flying, though many times it nearly cost him his life.
Gann wrote about it all in bestselling fiction and screenplays, too. But it is Fate Is the Hunter, his 1961 memoir of life as a commercial pilot, that endures. Aviators cherish it.
But its appeal is more than niche. For IDEAS contributor Neil Sandell, it's been his desert island book for half a lifetime. What inspires such a devoted following?
A lost 'romance of flying'
As a boy, Bow Van Riper devoured Gann's memoir as an adventure story. Later he came to appreciate it as an elegy to a bygone era. A historian and author, he says it stands out as a counterweight to pop culture's myth-making which elevates pilots to demi-gods.
Colleen Mondor was first drawn to the beauty of Gann's writing in college. A few years later, as a dispatcher for a small airline in Alaska, she found Gann's stories matched up with what she witnessed every day. And it rang true as an insider's account.
"He's letting you see what it's like inside the club," she told IDEAS.
At a different level, she says, it is about "the capricious nature of aviation. Sometimes it just doesn't make any sense. It's a very unforgiving activity. You can't make any mistakes. Sometimes you can get away with a mistake. But sometimes you don't. And so, you really can't make any at all."
Ron Rapp warms to the nostalgia of Fate Is the Hunter.
"Today we take flying for granted. It's like getting in a cab. It's not very glamourous. But back then it really was." Rapp pilots a Gulfstream business jet for a living.
"We've all seen pictures of what it looked like back in the cabin with people being served filet mignon and everyone dressed to the hilt. But it was a very different time up front. They didn't fly over the weather. They flew through it. They didn't have traffic detection equipment, decent radar, the weather data. They didn't have any of the stuff we take for granted today.
"There's a sense of adventure, an Indiana Jones sense, that's no longer there. We've lost the romance of flying."
The mystery of luck
If early air travel was glamourous, Gann's war years were anything but. He flew for the USAAF Air Transport Command which shipped materiel to the theatres of war in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This was the dawn of global logistics. Gann was one of its pioneers.
He flew Over the Hump — the perilous route over the Himalayas. He hopscotched across the North Atlantic: from Maine to Labrador to Greenland to Iceland to Scotland. Wartime flying was rough and ready.
"By the book" gave way to "get it done." That meant taking risks.
Gann tells the story of his first flight to Bluie West One, the new airfield at Narsarsuaq, Greenland. Built at the end of a fiord, it was a cul de sac for an aircraft like a C-47.
After crossing the North Atlantic, and nursing his fuel supply, Gann finds the Greenland coast shrouded with low cloud. There is no good map, no radio signal. He drops his altitude to 50 feet, skimming icebergs, searching for the correct fiord. It is guesswork and it is nearly fatal.
The tale is one of a dozen brushes with death aloft: fire on board, sabotage, heavy ice, mechanical failure, fuelling errors, getting lost over the Amazon. Time after time, Gann escapes through sheer good fortune. It leaves him perplexed. How am I not dead?
That question gets at the centre of gravity of the memoir: the mystery of luck. Is there a guiding hand that shapes our lives? Or is the universe chaotic and random?
Gifted by good fortune
In 1959, Gann begins writing Fate Is the Hunter. He holes up in a chalet in Norway surrounded by his flight logs, diaries, and old photographs. The experience is so vivid, it is as if his old comrades are in the room. And he broods.
Gann travels to Washington, D.C. where he combs through years of accident reports. A question troubles him. Why them and not me?
"I dismissed religion early in my speculations" he later wrote in A Hostage to Fortune, his autobiography.
"I knew that the virtuous had died side-by-side with the immoral, and the exit of both atheist and godly had been obviously haphazard."
Gann compiles a grim list: commercial pilots who perished during his flying career. They number more than 400. And that is how he begins his memoir — with their names. He closes with an epitaph.
"Their fortune was not so good as mine."
Fate Is the Hunter is rightly enjoyed as an adventure story or and as history. But it's Gann's meditation on luck that elevates the story into something profound.
As readers, we ponder our own moments of truth — of getting blindsided, of sudden loss or narrow escape. How do we make sense of them? Whom does fortune favour, or betray?
Guests in this episode:
David Foxx is an aviation writer in Adelaide, Australia.
Christiaan van Heijst is a Dutch photographer and pilot who flies a 747 cargo jet.
Colleen Mondor is an investigative journalist. She is the author of The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska.
Ron Rapp is a corporate pilot for a Fortune 100 entertainment company, as well as a flight instructor, writer, and aerobat.
A. Bowdoin Van Riper is a historian and the author of Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture.
Polly Gann Wrench is the daughter of Ernest K. Gann.
Excerpts from Fate Is the Hunter were read by Ian Brown.
Music used in the documentary: (under Creative Commons License, sourced in the Free Music Archive)
Daniel Birch: Drone & the Machine, Heartbeat Drone, Danger Drone, Weightlessness
Blue Dot Sessions: Emergent, Drone Lemon, Drone Birch, Velejo, The Records, Balti
Kai Engel: Blur
Filmy Ghost (Sabila Orbe): Labyrinth of Chasms
Meydan: Away
Poddington Bear: Fluorescence, Wavy Glass
Uuriter: Post Drone
Dan Yan-Key: Ambient Sonata
*Written and produced by Neil Sandell.
