One More For The Checklist
For some pilots, a good-luck charm is standard equipment.
- By Michael Klesius
- Air & Space magazine, September 2010
Carl Schahrer, commander of the B-29 Boomerang, shows off the talisman, on which his crew carved their missions.
Courtesy Darin Maurer
From his tour in an Air Force-Navy exchange program, retired U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Ralph Wetterhahn remembers a Navy pilot who had an odd practice. It was during the Vietnam War, and they both flew A-7 Corsairs from the carrier USS America. Wetterhahn can’t remember the pilot’s name; what he does remember is that every time the guy flew a mission, he would take along a small, rubber Snoopy doll. “Snoopy’s mostly a white dog, right?” says Wetterhahn, an Air & Space/Smithsonian contributor. “Well, that damn thing was filthy from grease and so on in the airplane. He’d jam it into the notch between the panel and the windscreen.”
One day, as the pilot prepared to launch, he realized he’d forgotten Snoopy. “The guy went bananas,” Wetterhahn recalls. “He got on the radio and insisted his roommate go downstairs and find it. He wouldn’t take that catapult shot without it.” Having flown aircraft for both services, including F-4s and F-15s for the Air Force, Wetterhahn guesses that naval aviators as a group might be a bit more superstitious. “I suspect the Navy guys had more to worry about, with cat shots and arresting gear, et cetera.”
Maybe. But a few decades ago, Bill Wallrich, who served in the Army in World War II and Korea, wrote an article, “Superstition and the Air Force,” for the journal Western Folklore. “The United States Air Force, although it has been in existence but a short half century, has developed a vast and definite folklore peculiarly its own,” Wallrich wrote. Within that folklore, he explained, could be found a specialized vocabulary of slang and argot, sayings and jokes, legends and tall tales, songs and ballads, heroes and buffoons. And yes, superstitions.
As I interviewed pilots for this article, a mysterious pattern emerged. Many denied being superstitious, then quickly followed with “…but I can tell you about a pilot who is.” Perhaps superstition is in the eye of the beholder. But Wetterhahn makes a point about carrier aviation that could also apply in other circumstances: “You get a cold cat shot, and you don’t really have any control over that.”
Control. Superstitions emerge as mental hedges against danger in situations where so much is beyond a person’s control. With pilots frequently in those situations, a rich lore of flying superstitions has accumulated. Military aviation, especially in wartime, has been the most fertile ground.
Consider P-38 Lightning pilot Carl Mills, who flew in Italy for the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II. Fellow P-38 pilot Dave Toomey remembers Mills as a top-notch flier, “but he wasn’t too keen about having his picture taken. It was sort of against his principle.” One day, Mills grudgingly allowed himself to be photographed just before a mission. “Then he went out and flew the mission, and wouldn’t you know he got his ass all shot up,” says Toomey. “Barely made it back on one engine. After that, if someone ever took a picture of him, he wouldn’t fly that day. I made the mistake of snapping his picture once, and he saw me do it and he really came at me. It took two guys to hold him back. He was rabid.”
During World War II, says Wallrich, the stress on pilots frequently produced superstitious behavior. The most common was the carrying of amulets and talismans like silver dollars, particularly (and counter-intuitively) when the numbers in the year added up to 13 (such as 1921), to correspond with that coin’s 13 stars and its eagle’s 13 tail feathers. Every unit had at least one bad-luck airplane—a “clinker,” in Wallrich’s words, whose temperamental behavior masked a darker jinx—and a charmed airplane that padded the odds for any pilot lucky enough to fly it.
Many airplanes flew with the name “Boomerang,” a reassuring omen for the crews because a boomerang always returns to where its flight began. The crew of the B-29 Boomerang, which flew 10 missions before its final one on August 15, 1945—the last bombing raid over Tokyo—carried a real boomerang on board, and all made it home safely.
Comments (1)
The Soviet space program, also has its many superstitions, most of them centered around the much-venerated Yuri Gagarin, such as going to his office to ask permission to fly, to urinating on the tires of the crew bus on their way to the launchpad, just as Gagarin is supposed to have done.
This is a link to an excellent article on that very subject:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1137/1
Posted by Mark Mallari on September 8,2010 | 09:08 PM