Folded Wings

FATE IS THE HUNTER (390 pp.)--Ernest K. Gann--Simon & Schuster ($6).

This is a man who has come a long way, not just on this night, but on so many years of nights when his way of life kept him aloft. He is a scarred warrior, accustomed to discomfort, danger and travail. He is not to be defeated; for having so many times emerged victorious, no other outcome enters his thinking. His home is in his flight bag, his wardrobe a rumpled uniform, and his office in the sky.

As 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." It is a testament to lost friends. Every chapter is darkened with the memory of fatal crashes. The dedication lists 397 "old comrades with wings forever folded."

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 named Dudley who flew copilot for a while on trans-Pacific runs. Dudley was a dud on instruments, but only after a couple of near crashes did anyone check his logbooks and find them an utter fiction. When he was fired, Dudley promptly got a job with another line and piled up in flames.

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 at sea.*

Old 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 instead, and all the innocence was gone from their eyes." He learned the subtle variations of the air, how "the jungle skies of South America are lush and inviting and altogether lacking in the antagonism and elderly stink of skies over similar jungles in Africa."

But 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.

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