MAKING FLIGHT SAFE

“He made his first million dollars by saving lives.”

In the earliest years of military aviation, flight was not merely dangerous—it was routinely fatal.

Training aircraft failed without warning. Engines quit. Wings twisted under stress. Spins developed suddenly and could not be recovered. Parachutes were not issued. A mistake at altitude usually ended at the ground.

Reuben H. Fleet entered aviation at a time when death was considered an unavoidable companion to progress. During the First World War, more pilots were lost to training accidents than to enemy action. Aircraft were crude, instruction uneven, and crashes were explained away as bad luck or the cost of daring.

How does a pilot—how does a passenger—feel when he knows he is going to crash? Reuben remembers little, so lightning-fast was the sequence of events: seemingly the space of a heartbeat between the final realization that this was indeed “it” and the shrieking, rending impact of the plane with the earth that only a second ago was thousands of feet below. After that—nothing.
— Quoted from Our Flight to Destiny, by Dorothy Mitchell Fleet

Crashes like this were not rare. They were expected. The prevailing belief was that flight itself was inherently lethal—and that no amount of effort could change that fact.

Fleet did not accept this.

He believed that if aviation was ever to become more than a novelty or a gamble, it had to be made predictable. Pilots needed aircraft that could recover from mistakes. Training had to be disciplined and standardized. Failure had to be analyzed, not ignored.

He confronted three forces that resisted change.

The first was technology itself. Early aircraft were unstable and unforgiving, designed without margins for error. Once control was lost, recovery was often impossible.

The second was apathy. Accidents were normalized. Losses were recorded and forgotten. Death was treated as fate rather than failure.

The third was human error—exhaustion, poor instruction, bad judgment—compounded by machines that offered no second chances.

Fleet approached the problem as an engineer and a commander. He treated crashes as data. He demanded redesigns when aircraft failed. He insisted that training aircraft be stable, durable, and capable of recovery. He rejected the idea that bravery could compensate for bad design.

These convictions hardened after the war.

When Fleet entered civilian aviation and later founded Consolidated Aircraft, his early success did not come from bombers or patrol planes. It came from building aircraft that worked—aircraft that forgave mistakes and kept pilots alive long enough to learn.

Safety was not a marketing slogan. It was a business model.

Training aircraft built to survive sold quickly, because parents, instructors, and organizations trusted them. That trust created demand. Demand created scale. Scale created wealth.

Fleet made his first fortune not by courting danger, but by removing it.

Only later would the same philosophy—discipline, predictability, and responsibility—be applied to long-range patrol aircraft and heavy bombers. The wartime machines that followed were possible because a culture of safety already existed.

For the first time in history, aviation safety did not merely react to tragedy. It advanced.

Flight became something that could be learned, trusted, and repeated.

That achievement—quiet, methodical, and often overlooked—saved countless lives. It reshaped aviation permanently. And it defined the principles that guided everything Reuben H. Fleet built afterward.