Good luck

Whenever I wait at the gate of an airport, I try to get a glimpse of this peculiar custom in aviation, but so far I have never seen it. I wonder why!

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19 comments on “Good luck
  1. csaba says:

    Ils sont fou, ces Américains.
    [[ ( C ) Goscinny & Uderzo ]]

  2. Carsten Nikiel says:

    Contest comment: I vote for HANS, he must be a financial genius, as he is still in business even with Chuck as his pilot.

  3. mike says:

    Ha! That’s great that Hans is getting votes as well!

  4. Brian G says:

    I have been flying for a long tome and never heard of this.

  5. Patrick says:

    Contest comment: CHUCK, obviously. He’s so much closer to reality than any of us will ever be willing to openly admit.

  6. Awesome says:

    I vote for all the random ‘chicks’ that reject all of Chuck’s advances.

  7. David says:

    Contest comment: My favourite is CHUCK, of course. He’s so ingenuous! No matter what happens, for him the world keeps turning and the grass still grows…

  8. Mark E says:

    Contest comment: definitely Julio, as an A&P I can feel his pain

  9. Jesse says:

    Contest comment: Chuck, because he survived this long, even though he is one big fool.

  10. William Vergonet says:

    Contest Comment: I vote for JULIO, as he is the best example of a “Real” aviation mechanic!!

  11. J. V. says:

    Julio… because he is just like my husband!!

  12. Michael says:

    Chuck has once again gotten his facts wrong. This is a tradition amongst bomber pilots, and only those who fly tailwheel aircraft, can take part in this tradition…

  13. William Vergonet says:

    I agree with ^ Michael, I asked some of the experienced pilots (old guys) and I got told the same thing. It was a superstition having to do with returning home. I dont remember it in the “Memphis Belle” movie though…lol

  14. mike says:

    I am glad some of you have heard about the tradition. For a moment we thought we were the only ones. I didn’t know about the tailwheel thing though to be honest. But wasn’t everything tailwheel back then? 😉
    Also, nobody is surprised that Chuck got his facts wrong, right?! 😉

  15. gregory says:

    WHY DON’T BIG PLANES HAVE LITTLE PLANES?

    A mother and her son were flying Southwest Airlines. The son (who had been looking out the window) turned to his mother and said, “If big dogs have baby dogs and big cats have baby cats, why don’t big planes have baby planes? ”

    The mother (who couldn’t think of an answer) told her son to ask the Flight attendant. So the boy walked down the aisle and asked the flight attendant, “If big dogs have baby dogs and big cats have baby cats, why don’t big planes have baby planes?”

    The attendant asked the young man, “Did your mother tell you to ask me?”? He said that she had. The flight attendant knelt down and whispered in the little boy’s ear, “Tell your mother that it’s because Southwest always pulls out on time.”

  16. markm says:

    Mike: “But wasn’t everything tailwheel back then?” Most, especially at the start of WWII, but far from all, and you just gave me an excuse to wander through Wikipedia looking for pictures of airplanes with the landing gear deployed.

    The US Navy clearly liked tail-draggers until they switched to jets – it makes sense for the tailhook to hang low, but with jets it became more important to keep the tail up so the jets didn’t sear the deck as much. The very last piston-engined torpedo bomber design, Douglas XTB2D, had tricycle gear, but (as the “X” indicates) only two prototypes were built before the Navy decided the whole concept of torpedo bombers was outdated.

    In land aircraft, the B-17 was a taildragger, but the B-24 and B-29 had tricycle gears. The B-25 and B-26 medium bombers were tricycle. The C-47 (DC3) transport was a taildragger, but most airliners and transports after that were tricycle. Smaller bombers such as the B-18 or the De Havilland Mosquito were mostly taildraggers, with the exception of the A-20 and A-26. There were two fighters with tricycle gear, but I think that was driven by their unusual configurations: the P-38 twin-engined twin-tailed fighter, and the P-39 with the engine located where the wing crossed the fuselage, and the prop-shaft going between the pilot’s legs.

  17. Awesome says:

    ^ And the P-38 and P-39 were both around before WWII started, with the P-39 actually seeing combat at the beginning of the war. So yes, there were tricycle planes “back then.”

  18. SAS7 says:

    Contest Comment: Chuck always makes the strips hilarious- he always makes me “Chuck”le!

  19. Mauro says:

    If I remember well it is a custom in Baykonur Cosmodrome to pee on the Soyuz rocket before being launched into space, legend says that Gagarin did that before being launched as first person in Earth orbit.

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