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FATE IS THE HUNTER (390 pp.)-Ernest K. Gann-Simon & Schuster...
...seen by Author Gann, the commercial airline pilot seems to be a reliable fellow-decent, dedicated, cautious and undaunted. Yet, airline passengers who pick up this book are bound to come to an alarming conclusion: the man who flies often enough, whether the captain at the controls or the traveler in the cabin, is doomed. Fate is more than a fine literary record of Gann's own career as a commercial pilot, reaching back to the days of open-cockpit biplanes "and the strangely pleasant odor of wood and shellacked fabric, of which our airplanes were made...
Brief Nightmare. As Gann showed in his bestsellers The High and the Mighty and Twilight for the Gods, he can tell a story. And this time, he need not bother to invent a plot. He simply tells his experiences with the authority of a survivor. Gann started flying the airlines in the pre-World War II days, just when the job began to seem respectable. "Agents even urged line pilots to buy insurance." But he brushed too close to disaster too often; he realized how the unexpected can upset an actuary's figures. He remembers a ham-handed clod...
...Gann also recalls the brief nightmare when three engines on a C-54 began to cut out just after he took off from La Guardia. He limped back to the runway-to find that the engineers had fitted his ship with experimental spark plugs, without warning him. Then there was the plane he was flying from Honolulu to Oakland. It vibrated strangely at odd moments. Days later he discovered that if he had slowed down cautiously, he would have surely crashed...
Using fused sticks of dynamite, the terrorists jolted the city three times within 40 minutes. First target was Fire Chief Gann L. Nalley, who had ordered fire hoses turned on the mob marching on Central High last month; an explosion shattered Nalley's city-owned red station wagon parked outside his home. A second blast, 33 minutes later and eight miles away, blew in the glass front of an office building housing Little Rock Mayor Werner C. Knoop's construction firm. Five minutes later dynamite thrown through a ground-floor window partially wrecked the Little Rock school district...