Airmen Are

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 660, 11 May 1929, Page 18

Airmen Are

Superstitious

I IKE the navigators of the sea, the navigators of the air have their superstitions. They have their “charms,” which they believe are blessed with beneficent powers; they have their omens, which they believe to presage tragedy. And many are the strange, almost eerie, tales that airmen tell of incidents in the war which bore out the beliefs attached to their superstitions.

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IRDMEN soared into the air, their “charms” in their pockets . . . and they went through liviug hells and came out alive.

[ sists of a horseshoe about two inches in circumference, on the inner side of which is inscribed: “Faith is Hope.” During the war the best pilot in the British Central Flying School owned one of these —and he survived more bad crashes than any other man at the station. There was one pilot, a Pole, who. during the war, had a small box built into the side of his plane, close to his right hand. Here he made a comfortable little nest for his mascot—a snowy white Imperial Pelting drake! It went up with him on every flight he made . . . and he came through tha war unscathed. His Five "Charms" There was one scout pilot in the war days who never went up without five "charms" in his possession. One was a “squared 13/’ engraved on a thin gold plate; another was a locket which he was never seen to open; a third “was a bit of lace, from a handkerchief—sentiment here! a fourth was a tiny drawing upon a bit of oiled silk, and the fifth a metallic object like a ring sewn into a small cloth sack. His experiences to some materialistic eyes might N indicate that his “charms” failed him; on the other hand, they might show just the opposite . . . for he was shot down in Germany, spent months in a German prison, escaped, and shot down again (this time in Poland), was captured by Bolshevik Cossacks, was sent to Moscow, spent 10 months in prison, escaped, walked from Moscow to Riga—the entire width of Western Russia—and arrived in England alive. When you come ot think of it, those treasured “charms” performed their work rather well. . . .

Others went up when the omens warned them not to . . . and they never came back. Flying is still in its infancy; thus these superstitions of the airmen hare not had time to develop into general beliefs. They are at present mostly individual superstitions. Yet there are one or two established omens which most airmen, if they are at all superstitious, respect. They are interesting because they show how easily and how quickly superstitions grow. You may wave away superstitions with a gesture of heroic scoru. But do you know that on Armistice Day, when many flyers rose into the blue sky, now strangely empty of the din of war, on their last flights from a certain field, a remarkable number of them never came back alive? It is regarded as one of the real "jinxes” of the service to make your last flight from some field before being transferred or before retiring from the game, and the records show that more good pilots were killed or injured during their last flights than on any other occasions. Another strong superstition is that it is highly dangerous to allow your photograph to be snapped before taking off. The Gold Horseshoe Of the “charms” which are believed to ensure the possessor a safe journey, the small gold horseshoe of the British Royal Air Force, is the most popular . . . and the' rarest; rare because it is so prized. The “charm” con-