“The Right Stuff”

The aspect of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” that most intrigued me was how anytime a test pilot died because of a problem in the air, the other pilots, rather than feeling sorry for his death and looking at him as someone who died for his country, dismissed his status as a pilot and claimed that he did not have “the right stuff.” In test flight there are so many things that can go wrong, many of which are beyond the pilot’s control. However, the pilots who lived had such inflated egos that they believed all of the deceased pilots not to have the right stuff, even though many of those things could easily happen to them. Wolfe writes,

“Every wife wanted to cry out ‘Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better?’ Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew it wasn’t right even to suggest that. Pete never indicated for a moment that he thought any such thing could possibly happen to him. It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot’s confidence by posing the question. And that, too, was part of the unofficial protocol for the Officer’s Wife.” (13)

This is a common reaction to discussion between fighter pilots in which they claim that some other pilot did not have “the right stuff” simply because he died in flight. However, Jane, and all the other wives, have a different perspective because they are not actually in flight themselves. While the fighter pilots believe themselves to be immortal if they have “the right stuff,” the wives understand that a man can be a perfectly competent pilot and still die in flight if something goes wrong. However, it is possible that the reason so many pilots did die was a result of their feeling immortal following their judgement of the other fighter pilots who died for the same reason.