Ernest Gann Fate is the Hunter

4RNB

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Fate is the Hunter is an amazing book, go read it if you have not. I fly on the backs of giants!

Anyway, in reading about the above book, I regularly saw claims that it was one of the best books on aviation. I am left wondering, what are the other best books about aviation? What other books should I be reading and why?

Thank you.
 
North Star Over My Shoulder by Bob Buck. Buck also wrote an amazing book on wx called Weather Flying, but it’s more of a textbook than a story.
 
North Star Over My Shoulder by Bob Buck. Buck also wrote an amazing book on wx called Weather Flying, but it’s more of a textbook than a story.
Thank you, reviews look incredible. Will read
 
His book The high and the mighty isn't quite up to the same level, but from a "see how they flew back in the day" point of view, it is reasonable.

West with the night by Beryl Markham was a good book.

Spirit of St Louis by Charles Lindbergh was pretty good.
 
"A higher call" is amazing; couldn't put it down. "Ferry pilot" is also riveting. I've started "fate is the hunter" a couple times, but it hasn't hooked me. It's on the top of my stack, but I haven't been reading much lately.
 
“Fate is the Hunter” is my favorite aviation book ever. I’ve read it every five years since a guy I was flying with at Bar Harbor Airlines gave it to me in the mid80s. Flying over the Amazon following a magenta line is not quite the same as the way Captain Gann did it 90 years ago. Great read!
 
I still like Wager With the Wind by James Greiner, the Don Sheldon story about glacier flying in Alaska as he supported the Mt. McKinley climbers.

Fate is the Hunter
still remains my all time favorite, though.
 
Weekend Pilot by Frank Kingston Smith is good, as are his other books. They’re about private general aviation flying and a bit lighthearted.

Last Plane Out by John Ball was also decent, if a bit sappy.

I greatly enjoyed The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.

And this is a “must read” for any pilot:

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If you like Fate is the Hunter, read Gann’s Hostage to Fortune. I enjoyed that one even more than Fate is the Hunter.

It’s essentially a full autobiography of Gann’s life. Touches on many of the Fate is the Hunter stories but adds more details/background.

Guy had an amazing life.
 
"Island in the Sky" also by Gann.
I think this was his first novel.
His novel The High And The Mighty is of course very good too. But I think Island in The Sky was a better movie than was H&M.

Both of those novels were inspired by incidents described in Fate Is The Hunter.
 
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If you like Martha Lunken’s “Unusual Attitudes” column in Flying you’ll probably enjoy her book with the same title. It’s a compendium of old columns.
 
Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker

Those are very good too.
 
Weekend Pilot by Frank Kingston Smith is good, as are his other books. They’re about private general aviation flying and a bit lighthearted.
Weekend Pilot, more than any other single book, inspired my interest in flying. First published in 1957, it's now a fascinating glimpse of a bygone era of general aviation. Smith went on to become general aviation's greatest advocate and cheerleader in Washington DC. His books trace his progress getting his advanced ratings and his ownership of a succession of airplanes, including the Cessna 140 in which he learned to fly, then a Piper Comanche 250, a Piper Apache, a Cherokee Six 300 and finally downsized to a Cherokee 140.
 
His novel The High And The Mighty is of course very good too. But I think Island in The Sky was a better movie than was H&M.

Both of those novels were inspired by incidents described in Fate Is The Hunter.
I saw the Island in the Sky movie and liked it. I haven't see the High and the Mighty film.

I heard that Gann hated the Fate is the Hunter film.
 
"A higher call" is amazing; couldn't put it down. "Ferry pilot" is also riveting. I've started "fate is the hunter" a couple times, but it hasn't hooked me. It's on the top of my stack, but I haven't been reading much lately.

Confirmation of author name would be nice. Are these Gann Books? Makos? McCauley?
 
I've started "fate is the hunter" a couple times, but it hasn't hooked me.

Same. That, and Game of Thrones -- all the times I read about how amazing these things are, I get a bit of FOMO and think "so why am I not getting it?" :dunno:
 
I heard that Gann hated the Fate is the Hunter film.
The problem I think Gann had with the movie was the challenge of distilling the book into a movie length. How do you do that? As mentioned, both Island in the Sky and High and the Mighty were novels/movies based on single sub stories/chapters in the much bigger book and they worked well for translation to the big screen.

Gann kept trying to write the story for the movie and ended up basing it on the general theme of the book (that sometimes random events seem to be interconnected ala fate/destiny). But he was never happy with what he came up with and it got the point where even though he wrote the basic story, he tried to have his name removed from the film.

Personally, I actually like the movie, but then I saw it as a kid long before I ever read the book.
 
Some of these have already been mentioned, I typed it some time ago for another discussion, some are out of print but can usually be found, but here are some of the titles on my bookshelf, (in no particular order):

Anything early (Stranger to the Ground, Biplane, Nothing by Chance, A Gift of Wings) by Richard Bach, before he got all New Agey weird and stopped writing about airplanes (though Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions are fun reads if you don't take them seriously). Though I recently read Travels With Puff and enjoyed it, you just gotta ignore the parts where the airplane talks to him about the meaning of life.

Anything from Ernest K. Gann. Most of his stuff is about the years around WWII and after, but 'Gentlemen of Adventure' is about some WWI pilots and their lives in later years.

Any of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's flying stories (some of the best, but I really have to be in the mood for his writing style).

Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck, two kids fly a Cub across the US in the early 1960s.

The Cannibal Queen , about flying a Stearman around the US, and Flight of the Intruder (a Vietnam tale) by Stephen Coonts.

The Air Devils by Don Dwiggins (the story of the early barnstormers).

Slide Rule by Neville Shute.

WWII:
Reach For the Sky by Paul Brickhill (the story of Douglas Bader, the legless Battle of Britian ace).
Fly For Your Life by Larry Forrester (the story of Bob Tuck, another Battle of Britian pilot... Tuck and Bader did not like each other).
The Look of Eagles by John Godfrey, an American fighter pilot.
Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles, a B-17 pilot.

Ultralights/microlights:
On a Wing and a Prayer by Colin MacKinnon, a Scotsman flying an ultralight across the southern US.
Global Flyer by Brian Milton, who flew a microlight around the world, more or less... he comes across as kind of a jerk, but it's an interesting read.
Propellerhead by Anthony Woodward, who decides to learn to fly to impress girls. This one alternates between "what an idiot" and "yeah, well, I did that too."
Flying With Condors by Judy Leden.

Marooned by Martin Cadin is a fictional novel about spaceflight, but has a great chapter about an 1960s USAF pilot taught to fly a Stearman by an old curmudgeon of an instructor.

Flight to Freedom by Michael Donnet. True story about a Belgian Air Force pilot stuck in occupied Belgium after Germany invaded finds a derelict Stampe biplane in a barn, fixes it up in secret, and flies to England.

Voyager by Jeanna Yeager and Dick Rutan, about the round the world flight.

Yeager, the autobiography, and Forever Flying, about Bob Hoover. Two contemporaries with very different personalities.

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. Much better than the movie.

Rickenbacker, the autobiography.

The Spirit of Saint Louis by Charles Lindbergh.

Listen! The Wind by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

A Rabbit in the Air and The Grashoppers Come by David Garnett, about flying in Britian in the 1930s.

Every pilot knows about (and should read) Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langeweische, but his lesser known works (A Flier's World, I'll Take the High Road, and Lightplane Flying are all worth reading.

Happy Flying, Safely by Duane Cole, about low and slow cross country VFR flying.
 
"Slide Rule by Neville Shute."

Second this recommendation. It's airship age, so kinda funny with today's balloon adventures. It's also at least as much about engineering as aviation...should be a must read for any engineer IMO.
 
Every pilot knows about (and should read) Stick and Rudder by Wolfgang Langeweische, but his lesser known works (A Flier's World,...


I'm sure it's a great book, but I can't bring myself to pay more for it than I paid for my last annual.

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Would you mind lending me your copy?
 
Slide Rule by Neville Shute.


Shute's book No Highway is pretty good if you don't get too put off by the mysticism methodology for locating a lost plane. I've been meaning to read Slide Rule but haven't yet.
 
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