"Spoiler Never Cools Metal before He Puts It in the Scrap Box"

The U.S. Navy lost more than 8,000 people in aviation accidents from 1941 to 1946. Safety posters used cartoons and humor to stress the importance of following safety procedures—and the grave consequences of carelessness. The Navy’s Aviation Training Division created two blundering cartoon characters—Dilbert the pilot and Spoiler the mechanic—whose slip-ups endangered lives and equipment. Robert Osborn, the artist, logged more than 400 hours of flying time and interviewed hundreds of naval personnel to make the characters and their mishaps as authentic as possible.

Starting in 1942, the Navy displayed the posters, one at a time, in hangars and ground schools. Each day or two, pilots and mechanics saw a new cartoon featuring a situation directly related to their training. This poster comes from a series focusing on aircraft mechanics. Here, an unlucky sailor discovered that Spoiler left a hot piece of metal in the scrap box.