This is a book report, but also a smattering of side-bars that crossed my mind either as I read the book, or was writing this report. I am hoping to keep you amply entertained and interested, whether it be my story, or Ernest K. Gann’s, or the combination platter.
Let’s start with example of classic movies. Some of the classics during or before my youth were: The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and Its a Wonderful life. I think we will have to wait to see if more recent blockbusters like Back to The Future, Titanic, Sleepless in Seattle, or Top Gun truly earn classic status. So, moving from the example of classic movies to classic books, I would bet the list is longer. References to these classics find their way into our everyday lives. For example, “Here’s looking at you kid” with a wink and a smile, “I feel the need for speed”, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”, “Gigawatts”, and “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a (since you know the historically censored word, this makes makes my point)!”. These are all fairly common phrases that point back to the classics. Like an inside joke, if somebody works one of these lines into a conversation, we are all taken back to the movie scene they allude to. If you are to get the reference to a classic movie, you have to have seen the movie. Likewise with a book, you must read it.
Somehow I made it to 40 years as a pilot without reading a classic among aviators, Fate is the Hunter, an autobiographical adventure by Ernest K. Gann. Having just finished it, any reference to his timeless insights will no longer be met with a blank stare and I can shed the embarrassment that, as a career pilot, I had not read it. It is a collection of undoubtedly true stories during his flying years. While he does not specifically tell us dates, he becomes a crew-dog before WWII, relating his days as an inexperienced DC-2 copilot, and continues through the war and into the mid 1950s, when he finishes up as a seasoned captain, but left the business earlier than most.
I can tell you, because I am living a modern version of his airline life, that his stories transcend time. He animates fate, giving it both life and a fickle will. His purpose is supposedly to tell us how his many associates became victims of fate, as was happening all around him during these years, and to point out the many times he should have been fate’s next customer. But mostly the book is a forum for him to describe what life was (is) like in the cockpit. His own fate often depended on hard choices of equal odds, or only a slight hunch to tip the scales, and he always came up lucky. That ever-present irony continued until he was 81, when he died of natural causes. The converted chicken coop he used as an office to write his several books is displayed annually at the Oshkosh fly-in. While the book serves as an interesting time capsule for dated technology and social viewpoints (not to mention smoking habits), my biggest take-away can best be expressed by the old adage: The more things change, the more they stay the same. You can truly use his book to learn what life is like in the cockpit today as he captures the thankless justice of the airline seniority system, uncloaks the timeless ego of pilots everywhere (which they have the audacity to call humility), and demonstrates the silly shorthand we often use use (such as the name of the DC-2 defroster hose that I dare not repeat here). He also tackles topics like the distinction between fear and fright, and the way a seemingly meaningless experience can save your life years down the road. Captains of the time never received sensitivity training and were allowed to cross the line into overt humiliation. Gann tells of some extremes in his training to make the point that such imposed tribulations served as a test, or necessary experience, to make sure the trainee had enough fortitude in him to cope with future unforeseeable predicaments. He did draw upon his learned perseverance to save his own life in subsequent stories, not to mention the lives of his passengers. Nowadays, with FAA mandated Cockpit Resource Management training (CRM), we are expected to teach these things by leading a chorus of Kumbaya, and the captain can be reported to “Professional Standards” if he is offensive in the slightest way. Hopefully our ability to create predicaments in the simulator is an alternate way to determine a pilot’s ability to fight on when the chips are down. One thing that remains true is that pilots are self-policing. A cockpit mistake is always noticed by the symbiotic peer sitting just inches away. The pride of being viewed as competent creates a natural mandate to think ahead and strategize if only to avoid embarrassment. So while Gann’s crew- members are belching, reading books, playing practical jokes, and looking for shortcuts, his way of sniffing out the best focused on who he could rely upon in a pinch, and that has not changed.
Ernest K. Gann took advantage of a hiring spree during the late 1930s, initially flying domestic routes with contemporaries of Charles Lindbergh. He mentions that checklists were not used in one of his earlier stories, which suggests to me that their importance became more recognized within the industry as his career progressed. A crazy backwards evolution has occurred on this matter during my career. Twenty years ago, if we kept forgetting something, like turning on the transponder before takeoff, we would simply alter the checklist to help us remember. But now the lawyers have stepped in, all worried about company liability, and we are being forced to use the manufacturer’s checklist verbatim, no matter how poorly it is written. Now if I forget a switch it is Boeing’s fault. It is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog. We are opting not to use better and safer checklists just so we don’t get blamed after an accident that might not have happened if we had used it. (This was a trend in the early 2000s, getting better at my retirement in 2022).
As the war geared up, there became more and more of a need for international flying, and Gann’s adventures soon ricocheted him to all corners of the earth. On one page he finds himself dropping supplies to a peer who was forced to land a load of troops on a frozen lake in uncharted Canada. On the next page he is fighting bouts with malaria in the equally uncharted jungles of Brazil. He would have turned the Taj Mahal into rubble if he hadn’t thought of a very unorthodox last-second solution to his heat-dogged inability to climb. The same solution once saved me, I will add cryptically, and might have also on a another occasion had I thought of it in time (As me later, too many digressions, but boy I wish I had not picked a slow news-day for that one.).
Although he never tells us the name of his company, it turns out that he flew for American Airlines. He gave that away by telling us about his first takeoff in a DC-2, when the captain called “Gear up” and raised an open palm. American is the only carrier that uses that hand signal, and it is remarkable that the custom has remained for so many generations since. It is sort of like the human appendix, passed down from ancient ancestors with no real purpose, yet still with us. (Year 2022, this is all but gone). He also touches upon less tangible traits that you would probably miss, not being family, but I was left in awe as he captured them in words. He learned of his reassignment to the war effort in the LaGuardia chief pilot’s office, which probably the same office maintained by American through most of my career. It must follow that the dated building where I had my new-hire indoctrination, and walked through on a weekly basis, was a place where he and I shared the same experiences, separated by eight decades. (When I first wrote this, the New York Port Authority was finally taking bids for replacement terminal buildings and I believe that building has been leveled).
At one point, like a sidewalk artist, he captured the essence of each of the main airlines with a few simple lines. American pilots were “a mixed lot, prone to complaint and rebellion”, United pilots were “colorless and sticklers for regulations”, Pan Am was “shy and backward in foul weather”, while Eastern was “not given to timidity, and if the pilot now beneath us has refused to continue his approach, then the conditions must be very unpleasant indeed”. Sadly, some of those airlines could not adjust to the loss of habitat known as deregulation and were driven to extinction, while others only survived by crossbreeding and forfeiting the ability to carry on the family name (as will be the fate of USAIR).
To my amazement, he and I have referenced the same proclivity for the daring among Eastern pilots, validating his point that it was their reputation, and my point that the culture of his day has trickled into my era. Referencing my previously written story called Ready For Anything, I mentioned our unsuccessful attempts to land out of the fog at LaGuardia while Eastern was getting them down between our attempts. I related the same basic comment from my captain about Eastern’s “reputation for that”. Since I had not read Gann’s book yet, I have inadvertently supported his characterization of Eastern and the larger premise that each airline has systemic traits that get passed on to subsequent generations, like a complicated DNA (That’s pilot generations, I think we still have some of the same flight attendants). In addition to Eastern’s reputation there was another ironic truth that I had already written about without the benefit of his insights. Inflight shutdown #2 found me riding surface transportation from Milwaukee to Chicago surrounded by my former passengers after an engine failure “ The bus ride was quiet. If anybody had asked me for detail, I am sure I was less than prolific”. Compare that to the words of Gann “talking to passengers is a no-win endeavor”; many might wonder why he said that, but I got it.
He has one chapter named RULE BOOKS ARE PAPER. Maybe you can explain that title to me; I cannot imagine what he meant by it. Wink Wink. While his larger points might earn the name of a chapter, I believe he had the loftier goal of using his assorted anecdotes to communicate the myriad of dimensions that exist within a cockpit, such as awe, boredom, impatience, urgency, fear, sweat, and more. I can tell you that all of those things exist at times, but I could not possibly convey it with the same artistry. I will say this: Every pilot gets a window seat. We see spectacular things more often and
with a better vantage than any passenger. Shooting stars, weather formations, airplane formations (in a sense anyway) and geologic formations to mention a few. He takes the opportunity where he can to
show his appreciation for this perk, describing it well in the process. How many times in my career have I chased the sun across the sky only to lose the inevitable race to a spectacular sunset? If you would like to see such awesome sights, as well as the gloomy ones, read his book and see it with his
words.
Maybe now is a good time to tell my UFO story, since it involved a rather unique sight. When I arrived on the AA flight-line in 1987 I already had 3000 hours of military flying under my belt, but in all that time I had never seen anything like this thing hoovering over the Atlantic that night. It had all
the features of a flying saucer (who remembers the Jupiter II?), plus it glowed as if it was red hot. But I didn’t believe in UFOs; it had to be something else. But what? I was embarrassed to ask the other two pilots, who were engaged in unrelated conversation. They evidently found this massive and rather obvious thing to be unremarkable. I cranked my head around to get a better view, as much as I was able from my flight engineer’s seat, but I simply could not figure out what I was looking at. I let some time pass, hoping that it would reveal itself as something benign and completely normal, but that just wasn’t
happening, leaving me completely stumped. Finally I interrupted the pilots and asked if they minded a stupid question. They were kind under the circumstances, because I was pretty exposed. “That’s just the moon!” They said it with no unusual volume, but it loudly confirmed the notion that it was a stupid question. At that moment the moon seemed to jump off the horizon losing its redness, showing it’s full roundness, and lighting up the whole sky. If I would have bitten my lip for just a few more seconds I could have avoided my embarrassment. Since that encounter I have seen the same thing many times, but it never seems to last as long as it did that night, and nobody has ever asked me what it was.
Earnest K. Gann was the “perfect storm” aviation author, to borrow from another classic. His reluctant attendance to the good schools his parents provided rubbed off more than his poor grades would suggest. I envy his way with words. In my occasional “war stories”, I try to describe the most noteworthy. But it is how he captured the least noteworthy that makes him most impressive to me. He helps you understand how a wry smile from a co-pilot, for example, might speak volumes. He distinguishes between a flick of a needle that means nothing versus a similar flick heralding near disaster. I liked how he accurately posted self-evident truths about pilots, like “pilots are incapable of ignoring a takeoff” to explain why he witnessed a crash. The nuances of interplay he describes within the cockpit and beyond, are as true now as they were then. He had an interest in film-making before his flying, and each flight must have echoed in his head as a book or a screenplay after he lived it.
If you think you can take a shortcut by seeing the movie, think again. Ernest K. Gann disavowed all association with the 1964 movie of the same name, Fate is the Hunter, because they strayed so far from what he had written. He later hinted regret about this altruism because it cost him considerably in lost royalties. If you insist upon taking the easy way out, see the 1954 movie The High and The Mighty. It stars John Wayne in a situation that almost escaped the attention of both pilots. Their only indication of trouble was an almost imperceptable rumble from a component failure that, determined in hindsight, had already taken down two similar aircraft. On this one he took full credit as writer, and I can’t wait to see it. This same story is presented briefly in Fate is the Hunter as one of the times Captain Gann cheated death. As a pilot, he was either very lucky or very good; from my vantage I conclude that both are true. But as an author there is no question.
Captain’s Log 