Using Stupidity to Make People Smart

Every Monday a crowd would form in the mail room. That was the day The Navy’s Safety bulletin came out. I always found it odd that all of us Air Force folks would clamor for a Navy publication, but this was before the internet and this was the closest thing we had to cat videos or memes.

Every service branch issues safety bulletins in an attempt to make the inherently dangerous profession of being in the military more safe. Most bulletins are painfully dry, or lame. Monologues on safety procedures, or something so obvious your eyes involuntarily roll back as you read it.

But the Admiral in charge of the Navy’s program took a different approach. They collected the various stupid acts that occurred around the Navy, wrote them up in short snappy snippets, and published them in a weekly bulletin. And people couldn’t get enough of them.

The newsletter always had some comments about regularly occurring acts of stupidity, usually including some type of tally that we used to create a weekly pool. These acts included:

• Jumping out of a moving car. Seems a lot of young, and often drunk sailors and marines will exit a moving car in the middle of an argument.
• Jumping off a hotel balcony. When deployed ships pull into a harbor in some strange exotic land, many of the crew will rent hotel rooms. Many go out to see the sites, including the bars where they drink too much. They then come back to the hotel room on the 3rd, 4th, 5th, or higher floor. And decided to jump into the pool from their balcony or window. Many miss, or hit a tree, or they make the pool, but land in the shallow end. These happened every week!
• Incredibly stupid drunken acts. There was a least one story per week about some amazingly stupid thing somebody did while drunk. Some I remember include sneaking into a zoo to try to pet a bear. Another was a trio of sailors who decided to take a shortcut on the way back from the bar and climbed a fence that surrounded a nuclear power plant (they sobered up after 3 days in jail).

Besides the weekly regulars, there was usually one major write-up about a major event. And it didn’t always have to be the Navy. We once read about an Air Force mishap that we had not heard through our safety channels…

The story was that an F-16 Fighter jet was on a cross-country trip. Several hours into the flight the pilot felt the call of nature. As the plane is a small single-seater, they have to use a special plastic bag to do this.? The pilot undid his lap belt, unzipped his flight suit, and began to relieve himself. But as he did, the lap belt slid off his lap and the buckle ended up getting under the joystick that controlled the plane (the F-16 joystick is on the right side of the seat). As the pilot moved around, the buckle pushed the joystick…hard over to the right. This put the plane into a downward spiral. The pilot grabbed the joystick and pulled back, but this just jammed the buckle tighter. The spiral increased in speed and the pilot began to experience disorientation caused by high g-forces. He could not get the aircraft out of the spin and had to eject. (Note: Seeking to verify this, we ended up researching it ourselves and found an Air Force report that the pilot used his feet to push himself up to get himself in position, and when he did, he hit the rudder pedals of the plane that caused the spin). Regardless, a F-16 fighter jet went down, and a pilot had to eject.?To add to the story, the Navy write-up implied that the pilot was still “unzipped” when he ejected.

Now something like that gets everyone talking about safety.

And that is why we queued every Monday for a chance to read the Navy Safety Bulletin. Never even realizing the marketing brilliance of the Navy staff…getting us excited about safety!

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