Gene Roddenberry survived three plane crashes before creating Star Trek

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had quite an impressive career as a screenwriter, developing one of the most influential and popular science fiction franchises of all time. His legacy through Star Trek is truly something special, impressing with his progressive, humanistic worldview through the ideals of Starfleet, but even without Star Trek, Roddenberry is a (more or less) secret legend, having survived several plane crashes during his time in the military and as a commercial pilot for Pan American World Airways (Pan Am). His work on Star Trek is of course much better known, but the incredible stories behind his near-death experiences as a pilot help fans better understand the man who gave us Captain Kirk, Spock, and the whole beautiful, utopian universe of Star Trek.

(Of course, he had originally pitched Star Trek to the studios as a space western, comparing it to the popular series Wagon Train, but his own idealism was bound to leak through.)

As for Roddenberry’s extremely eventful career as a pilot, the stars seemed to align to keep him around long enough to make Star Trek – although unfortunately not everyone he crashed with suffered the same fate. It’s no wonder that Roddenberry eventually left aviation, but not before fighting America’s enemies and saving a few lives.

Gene Roddenberry was called up to fight for his country after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In September 1942, he served as a pilot in the Pacific during World War II. At just 21 years old, Roddenberry had to contend with terrible tropical weather, enemy fire, and mechanical failures while trying to keep his plane in the air, which sounds pretty hellish. Unfortunately, he experienced two crashes while in the military – one as a pilot and one as a passenger. The more significant and well-documented crash occurred on August 2, 1943, when Roddenberry, piloting the “Yankee Doodle,” had trouble gaining enough lift on the runway of a disputed island in the South Pacific and crashed into the trees, killing two of his comrades. Investigations into the crash absolved Roddenberry of any blame, but he reportedly took it hard and blamed himself for their deaths.

Roddenberry later in life recounted a second crash, but one in which he was a passenger and there were no fatalities. He told biographer Alexander David that he pulled several men from the burning wreckage during a small military operation that ended with the plane crashing. He once said to a friend that perhaps getting those men to safety helped make up for the “Yankee Doodle” that was clearly still bothering him. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force as a captain in 1945 and was awarded both an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross – but his most heroic moment was yet to come.

In an amazing but true story, perhaps best documented in the comic strip The Oatmeal, Roddenberry was responsible for saving several lives when he was co-piloting a Pan Am passenger flight over the desert when it suffered a serious mechanical failure. As the plane burned and plummeted from the sky, he calmed the passengers and helped them get into the crash position. He then began pulling people from the wreckage, despite his own broken ribs.

An investigation was conducted into what caused the tragic crash, but ultimately it was determined that it was something maintenance should have detected, and Roddenberry, as co-pilot, had no control over it. Roddenberry was done hearing it, as another mechanical problem caused another near-crash for the young co-pilot that the airline could not pinpoint. Worried about leaving his wife a widow and his newborn daughter fatherless, he resigned from Pan Am in May 1948.

Initially he thought of making a living as a poet, but the idea of ​​being a writer soon struck. He then moved his family to Southern California and worked as a police officer with the LAPD while making a name for himself as a freelance screenwriter. In 1956, however, he quit to pursue a full-time career in television, and just eight years later he made history with Star Trek: The Original Series. Roddenberry could be notoriously difficult to deal with; he was sent away from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and had an animosity with Star Trek: The Next Generation star Patrick Stewart. But having survived all that, perhaps Roddenberry had earned the right to be.