Book Review

Fate is the Hunter

By Ernest K. Gann, and Reviewed by CW5 M. Joshua Muehlendorf

Article published on: March 1, 2025 in the January-March 2025 Edition of the Aviation Digest

Read Time: < 6 mins

Step back into aviation’s adolescence, a time when technology afforded significant leaps in speed and distance, yet still heavily relied on the crew’s expertise for even the most fundamental tasks of calculation and decision-making. Technical expertise and heart-stopping experience were the greatest commodities of the day for pilots. Ernest Gann chronicles his career in aviation from the mid-1930s through the war and post-war era into the 50s.

Fate is the Hunter is a must-read classic for any pilot. Gann expertly crafts the narrative in the pilot’s mind caught between their fears of failure and the demand to maintain a calm and collected demeanor for the crew. His candid humility can disarm the most stoic aviator and lead them to a peaceful acceptance of their own faulty humanity.

Ernest Gann began his flying career as an entertainer in a flying circus and giving dollar rides to fairgoers in an open cockpit single engine plane. He entered the airlines in the mid-1930s, flying in the Northeast for American Airlines. When World War II started, he volunteered for the Air Transport Command, or ATC, a branch of the United States Army Air Forces. After the war, he flew for various other airlines until the early 1950s when he decided to focus full time on his writing career.

The memoir opens in the cockpit wherein Gann is the CPT paired with the competent first officer, Beattie, as they make their way through the black night from Buffalo to LaGuardia, New York. An annoyed Gann makes a subtle correction to Beattie for having a map light so bright that Gann cannot read his instruments. The correction reveals an altimeter reading 50 feet above the assigned altitude. Gann smoothly corrects the altitude so as not to be thought less of by Beattie for a “sloppy mistake” just in time to avoid another airplane that passes right over the top of them. The whole event was over in 2 seconds, and there wasn’t even time to “quicken his breathing.” “Those fifty additional feet held only a few minutes previously–so insignificant then–are now revealed as the pinion of our lives” (Gann, 1961, p. 13).

He recalls his first training flight in what was then an airliner, the short-lived DC-2. After successful flight maneuvers and a first landing, his second landing “…is not a single landing but an endless series of angry collisions between the airplane and earth, each separated by spasms of engine roar as McCabe [instructor] tries grimly to terminate the steeplechase” (p. 31). He continues with the candid humility that pervades the book by stating, “In a few stunning moments all of the pride and assurance I had mustered and so carefully nurtured for this occasion have been destroyed” (p. 31).

We witness the maturing of a new airline pilot to a world-traveled seasoned aviator with even more humility and respect for his profession than when he began. His adventures include harrowing navigation to Greenland in the clouds using only time and heading until a radio beacon can be received, narrowly clipping the top of the Taj Mahal and exposing fraudulent pilots on cross-oceanic flights to Hawaii.

Throughout the book, Gann seems to be giving his confession of insecuri-ties and true thoughts he was unable to share at the time. He masterfully describes the cockpit environment where ego and confidence prevent honest vulnerability. It is a social construct wherein decorum is kept at all costs to maintain the hierarchy of CPT and copilot, even to the point of stubborn and proud disaster.

It is easy to see that Ernest Gann is as gifted a writer and storyteller as he is an aviator. We are fortunate to have such teachers that can bridge across generations to share their sage wisdom with our kind. I recommend Fate is the Hunter to all new pilots-in-command especially. There is no lonelier feeling than the insecurity of messing up when you are in command and feeling like you are the only one.

In 1964, 20th Century Fox produced the movie, Fate is the Hunter. The movie was inspired by the book, but it does not follow the storyline and instead, centers around a crash investigation.

Ernest K. Gann was not only an American Aviator, but an author, sailor, and conservationist. He is known for his novels, Island in the Sky and The High and the Mighty—and his classic memoir of early commercial aviation, Fate Is the Hunter, all of which were made into major motion pictures. He died in 1991.

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