Word: gann
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Fate Is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann. A novelist (The High and the Mighty) and oldtime airline pilot, the author tells eloquently about the attrition of confidence, caused by too many close scrapes and too many dead comrades, that persuaded him to give up piloting...
Fate Is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann. A novelist (The High and the Mighty) and oldtime airline pilot, the author tells eloquently about the attrition of confidence, caused by too many close scrapes and too many dead comrades, that persuaded him to give up piloting...
...Creed. For a long while, none of this bothered Gann unduly. Even the inevitable accidents flying with the Air Transport Command all over the world were taken as part of the job. He developed a veteran's pride as he passed the word to the swaggering newcomers who joined him on the job, the pistol-packing service pilots who had been rushed through Army flight schools. "These were the brave aerial children who would soon go down in flame and history as the Eighth Air Force. Later, when we brought them back, the accoutrements were gone. They wore medals...
...after a while, even for the professional pilot with a sense of the poetry of the air, the tensions began to tell. In 1954, Gann decided not to press his luck. On every flight, he caught himself worrying that the law of averages might hunt him down. He knew it was time to turn in his wings, for he could no longer repeat an old airline pilot's creed: "One thing I'm sure about. If my tail gets there, so will the passengers...
...Gann's plane suffered from a broken hinge bolt that helped hold the tail flipper. By sheer good fortune, he had flown with just the right combination of power, speed and weight to keep the damaged flipper from pulling too far away from the rest of the tail. On the very same day, an Eastern Air Lines DC-4, cruising in calm air over Bainbridge, Md., had the same trouble, nosed over into a death dive that killed all 53 on board...