As Pete Fusco moved from one wretched flying job to another in the early days of his aviation career, he displayed a knack for elevating the most ordinary situations to grand debacle. He maintains that it wasn't entirely his fault. He assigns part of the blame on the Gods of Aviation Misfortune, who seemed to stalk him for their own entertainment. The gods had help; along the way they enlisted the services of an ex-biker named Moondog, the Cleveland Mafia, a mythical beast known as the Curtiss C-46, a Miami smuggler of shrunken heads and a con artist named Three-fingered Hank. Fusco's story is the story of all pilots who ever chanced the long odds against making a living flying airplanes and lived to laugh about it.