Before Eddie Rickenbacker ever climbed into an airplane, he was already trying to go faster than most people thought was sensible. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, left school young after his father died, and eventually found his way into the rapidly growing automobile business. This was still the era when cars were dangerous, unreliable machines and racing them was closer to mechanical combat than modern motorsports. Rickenbacker loved it.
By his twenties, he had become one of the better race-car drivers in the country. He competed at Indianapolis several times and built a reputation for being fast, mechanically gifted, and unusually comfortable with risk. Then the United States entered World War I, and Rickenbacker went to France.
He did not initially go as a pilot. Because of his racing background, he was assigned as a driver and was even offered a position as General John Pershing’s chauffeur. That would have been a pretty good wartime assignment, especially compared with what was happening in the skies over Europe, but Rickenbacker had no interest in staying safely on the ground. He wanted to fly.
Air combat in 1917 was still a bizarrely new form of warfare. The first military airplanes had mostly been used to observe enemy movements from above, but it did not take long for pilots on opposite sides to realize that shooting at one another might also be useful. Soon the skies over France were filled with fighter aircraft made of wood, wire, and fabric, with pilots sitting in open cockpits thousands of feet above the ground with little more than goggles, a leather helmet, and a machine gun in front of them.
There were no ejection seats, and American fighter pilots generally did not carry parachutes. There was not much between a pilot and the ground except a thin wooden frame, stretched fabric, and an engine that was still a fairly new technology. Rickenbacker managed to get himself into flight training and eventually joined the 94th Aero Squadron, known by the famous “Hat in the Ring” insignia painted on its airplanes.
He turned out to be very good at it.
By the end of the war, Rickenbacker had been credited with 26 aerial victories, making him America’s highest-scoring fighter ace. One fight in particular became legendary. On September 25, 1918, he was flying alone over France when he encountered a group of German aircraft. There were seven of them.
Most people would probably have considered seven against one to be a good reason to go somewhere else. Rickenbacker attacked.
He dove into the formation, shot down one German fighter, then attacked an observation plane and brought that down too before escaping the remaining aircraft. Years later, he would receive the Medal of Honor for what he did that day.
The war ended a few weeks later, but Rickenbacker’s relationship with airplanes did not. He became deeply involved in the aviation industry and eventually took control of Eastern Air Lines. By 1941, he was 50 years old, wealthy, famous, and no longer the young man taking ridiculous chances over France.
Then his airplane crashed.
Rickenbacker was aboard an Eastern Air Lines DC-3 flying near Atlanta when it went down in February 1941. Several people were killed. Rickenbacker survived, but barely. He suffered a fractured skull, broken ribs, a shattered hip, a badly broken leg, and other serious injuries. For a time, doctors were not sure he would live.
He did.
A normal person might have decided at that point that he had received enough warnings from aviation. Rickenbacker apparently disagreed.
Less than two years later, the United States was fighting another world war, and Rickenbacker was sent on a military inspection trip across the Pacific. On October 21, 1942, he and seven other men climbed aboard a B-17 bomber in Hawaii and headed toward Canton Island.
Something went wrong with the navigation.
As the crew approached the place where the island should have been, there was nothing below them except ocean. They searched, recalculated their position, and kept looking. Still nothing.
Eventually, the B-17 began running low on fuel, and at that point navigation stopped being the real problem. Captain William Cherry brought the bomber down onto the Pacific Ocean. The impact was violent, but the airplane stayed together long enough for the men to get out before the B-17 sank.
Eight men were now floating in the middle of the Pacific in three small life rafts. They had very little food and almost no fresh water. The sun burned them during the day, they shivered at night, saltwater sores formed on their skin, and dehydration became a constant threat.
Days passed.
They caught rainwater when they could. At one point, a seagull landed on Rickenbacker’s head. He slowly reached up, grabbed it, and the men ate it. They then used pieces of the bird as bait to catch fish.
One of the men eventually died. The others kept drifting.
Rickenbacker, already in his fifties and still carrying the effects of the plane crash he had barely survived the year before, refused to let the group give up. After 24 days at sea, they were finally found. By then, he had lost roughly 40 pounds.
It is tempting to look at a life like his and conclude that Eddie Rickenbacker was simply very lucky. Maybe he was. But I think there is another lesson in it.
A financial plan is sometimes treated like its job is to predict the future accurately enough that nothing goes wrong. That has never made much sense to me. Things will go wrong. Markets will fall, tax laws will change, careers will end unexpectedly, health problems happen, businesses struggle, people live longer than expected, and houses need new roofs at exactly the wrong time.
The goal is not to create a plan where nothing bad ever happens. The goal is to create one that can survive when it does.
Rickenbacker did not survive because every plan worked. A lot of his plans failed spectacularly. He survived because when they did, there was still something left to work with.
That is a pretty good standard for a financial plan too.