Ernest K. Gann’s classic memoir is an up-close and thrilling account of the treacherous early days of commercial aviation. In his inimitable style, Gann brings you right into the cockpit, recounting both the triumphs and terrors of pilots who flew when flying was anything but routine.
"This book is an episodic log of some of the more memorable of (the author's) nearly 10,000 hours aloft in peace and in war. It is also an attempt to define by example his belief in the phenomenon of luck-- that the pattern of anyone's fate is only partly contrived by the individual".--The New Yorker.
"This purely wonderful autobiographical volume is the best thing on flying and the meaning of flying that we have had since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry took us aloft on his winged prose in the late 1930s and early 1940s. . . . It is a splendid and many-faceted personal memoir that is not only one man´s story but the story, in essence, of all men who fly."
