The Aviator/The Covenant/Hope/Bullet Train [antikvár]

December, 1928. A Stearman biplane is flying the mails from Elko, Nevada, to Pasco, Washington. The weather is uncertain, the terrain below perilous, but for the veteran pilot it is a joy to be aloft. Here, at eight thousand feet, no one can see the sadly scarred face that makes his life on the ground a lonely torment. No one, that is, except his eleven-year-old passenger, and she—surprisingly— seems not to notice it. Then, without warning, the plane runs into trouble. The two are marooned on a snowy mountainside. With almost no food and small hope of rescue, their situation is desperate indeed. All the pilot has going for him is a little girl's trust and a strangely haunting message from a letter in a mailbag. Against a background of personal experience, Ernest Gann has fashioned a moving and suspenseful story that vividly brings to Hfe the pioneering days of flight. preface I ineteen twenty-eight, like 1Q14, uoas a last year of innocence for much of the world. Only a very few foresaw the catastrophic financial events that began in North America the following year and soon affected all nations. Then innocence died once more, as it had when the cannons were silenced in iqi8. In ig28 the overwhelming majority of young Americans believed fervently in God, honor, duty, and country. They were proud of themselves and usually of their lifework. This was particularly true of airmen, many of whom first ventured aloft during the great war that ended in iqi8. They were open men of dash and predilection for hazard. They were instinctively obliged to continue in a profession that was opening new frontiers almost daily. Practicing it was still an art. It paid them modestly in money but lavishly in broken bones and death. Many of their kind died with their boots on while flying the mails. Airmail pilots were not considered solid citizens but bad insurance risks. Most did not really care, because they were enamored of flight. They lost themselves in it as a man may sometimes utterly abandon himself to an enchanting woman. The vehicles that bore these men through the lower altitudes were fragile creations of elementary design. Their engines were