"They Finally Took Spoiler Up in a Plane He Had Over-Hauled"

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. Navy pilots trusted mechanics to keep their aircraft in good working order. In this poster, Spoiler the mechanic gets a terrifying look at the consequences of his shoddy maintenance work.