April 2, 2019 Stripes

The Liberty Gazette

April 2, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Of the more than 314 million people in the United States, 49 per cent start their day with a bowl of cereal. This results in 2.7 billion boxes sold every year—enough to wrap around the earth thirteen times. But what would lure serial aviation columnists to this topic you ask? It all started with stripes.

When we learned there was turbulence over the meaning of stripes, we decided to save the world from such confusing flap. For background, you should know that Cap’n Crunch’s full name is Horatio Magellan Crunch and he was born on Crunch Island in the Sea of Milk.

The storm began brewing in 2013, when a food blogger noticed the Cap’n’s uniform only sported three stripes instead of four. This would make him a Navy Commander, a step down from a true Captain. When word got out, Cap’n Crunch tried to recover from this faux pas through Twitter. “Of course I’m a Cap’n! It’s the Crunch—not the clothes—that make a man.”

As we continued to dig deeper into the breakfast bowl, we discovered that the astronauts from Apollo 11 boosted their brain power while in space with a cereal breakfast. The cereal was mixed with fruit and pressed into cubes since the lack of gravity kept them from pouring it into a bowl with milk.

Further out to the edge cases, we learned that when Kix cereal issued its atomic energy-inspired Lone Ranger ring in 1947, the ring contained trace amounts of radioactive polonium, which glowed. Sadly, the material inside the rings had a short shelf life and none in existence work today, so we hear.

But back to the stripes. What you see in career pilot attire these days was introduced by PanAmerican Airways in the early 1930s. Before then, typical dress was World War I military style. That is, a comfortable shirt, khaki pants, black boots, silk scarves, and of course, the leather bomber jacket. When PanAm began flying South American routes in their Sikorsky S-38 and S-40 flying boats, management thought it would help passengers if their pilots looked more like sea skippers familiar with water vessels. That’s when pilot uniforms took the plunge to more closely resemble that of Naval officers, as they flew the American Clipper, Southern Clipper, and Caribbean Clipper.

PanAm’s great success caused others to follow suit, spoonful by spoonful. In today’s industry standard, we see officer-style caps with gold or silver insignia depicting the airline’s name or logo, black trousers, and black double-breasted blazers with braided loops on the lower sleeves denoting crew member rank. Four stripes on the shoulder epaulets and blazer arms are worn by the captain. Three stripes tells you that’s the first officer. On today’s passenger flights, two stripes typically means the person is a flight attendant.

While we know what to look for on each other, the dress code is often lost on the non-flying general public. But now Gazette readers are wiser than the average passenger bearing the weight of uniform ignorance.

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