Rewatched The Spirit of St Louis on one of my deadheads this weekend and was reminded of how the tenets of safe aviation do not make for good cinema.

We don’t tend to think of Lindy as reckless or irresponsible, but at a bare minimum, flying that fatigued was borderline suicidal. I don’t know how accurate all of the other details in the movie are, but it truly stands as a lesson of what not to do for modern pilots.

The “Lucky” prefix to Lindy was all too appropriate. His survival largely amounted to a bunch of unforeseeable things going his way after he had stacked the cards against himself in a way that had me cringing for most of the film.

But it’s a damn good movie. Just like Top Gun, Flight, The Right Stuff and any number of other films where the protagonist pilot eschews prudence and safety.