Fate

From the title to the Epilogue, the autobiography is themed around the notion of fate—accidents happen when they are fated and do not happen when they are not fated, and one's fate cannot be avoided. The prologue introduces the concept when Gann makes a minor altitude correction for no apparent reason and the action unquestionably saves his life. Similar incidents are liberally sprinkled throughout the remainder of the text.

Throughout the entire prolonged time period of Gann's flying his luck is good and his fate holds out. Even so, he goes through many troubling and dangerous episodes and many of them are near misses. In Chapter 18 Gann describes in detail one unsettling event—two planes suffer the same mechanical failure: one of them crashes with a loss of all hands, yet Gann's plane lands safely. Clearly, his fate is forestalled but he begins to wonder...