Ernest K. Gann writes best sellers about flying and fighting…. Mr. Gann's heroes, whether at war in ancient Masada or World War I France, are usually laconic, fiercely self-reliant loners, cynical sentimentalists, promiscuous with death, faithful to a pal.

Oddly, "The Aviator," seems to belong on that nostalgic cottage shelf, to have the descriptive feel and earnest tender style of popular novels written three decades ago; it might have appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post with brown-tinted illustrations, two tipped monoplanes aloft in the background, girl with windblown hair to the fore. Its subject is a favorite of Mr. Gann's: the flying world of gypsy moths in the 1920's….

The enchanting woman in this spare tale is not the siren of Faulkner's "Pylon" but an 11-year-old girl who manages to convince a misanthropic mail pilot to value life as the two labor together to survive their plane...