"The gigantic Dunn was good-natured enough, but he had a strange facility for making me feel unsure... Yet I learned a great deal from Dunn. He was always wary."
And from Chapter V-The Seasoning:
"From all these men, including the despotic Alessandro, I learned something of my craft. Little by little their skills and ways of thinking contributed to my own resources until they built into a separate entity which was specifically designed to transport and preserve the lives of others."
As it happens, I am aquainted with a retired AA pilot who joined in the early '40s and whose early career roughly paralleled that of Gann. Lots of wisdom in the head of a man who started on DC-2s as a copilot and retired as a DC-10 Captain having flown everything American flew in between. He's never told me anything about ice except to say it belongs in a highball, not on an airplane!