Eddie Rickenbacker is best known for one remarkable six-week period in 1918 when he recorded an amazing 20 victories, giving him a total of 26 and making him the USA’s most successful fighter pilot of World War I. But understanding the man capable of such a feat requires a look at the rest of his life – a life saturated with vision and courage, with the ability to see the future and the nerve to do what it takes to get there.
Before the war, Rickenbacker had already made a name for himself in the new sport of auto racing. He set a speed record at the Indianapolis 500 and earned an astounding $40,000 a year over his career. In the army he proposed the formation of a fighter squadron composed entirely of race car drivers, recognizing the similarity of skill and daring required to operate both machines. His courageous exploits with the 94th Airborne Squadron are legendary among fighter pilots. One bold attack, in which he flew solo into the midst of seven enemy aircraft, shooting down two, earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
After the war Rickenbacker was an automotive entrepreneur, president of Eastern Airlines, and a special assignments officer for the Pentagon during World War II. He was shot down over the Pacific and spent 22 days in a life raft with seven other men.
Good names are often made or lost based on how we respond to crisis situations. But our reactions in those defining moments are a function of the character we build throughout our lives. Such was the case for Eddie Rickenbacker. We remember him because of his heroic war deeds, but his entire life reveals a man well equipped to respond when crisis arose. His was a life of vision, lived on the cutting edge, always in the thick of new technologies and trends. And he displayed the willingness to take the risks necessitated by that vision – whether in the seat of a race car, the cockpit of an airplane, the head chair of a corporate boardroom, or the rubber bench of a life raft.
Vision and courage – the Rickenbacker formula for success.
“Aviation is proof that, given the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.” –Eddie Rickenbacker
Leading Business News Editor Note:
The people we've chosen to write about have/had their quota of human failings and foibles just like the rest of us... But they share one transcendent quality: All of them in some way, at some time, acted courageously. We appreciate columnist,
Jim Janz, focusing on Eddie Rickenbacker’s issues as well as his remarkable accomplishments because this better equips us to understand the reality of leadership.
