Learning to Fly: Bruce Carr's Guide to Impossible Survival
Good morning founder,
During World War II, young aviators with double-digit flight hours were thrust into the field, flying planes with the latest technology of the time with only basic experience. But the rapid curve of mission accountability made these young fighters ready to fly. Because they had to. There was no time for tests or breaks. The time required them now.
This is a story about learning to fly before you think you're ready.
The Education of Bruce Carr
In 1942, at age 19, Bruce Carr found himself at the controls of one of the most powerful machines of his era. His introduction to flying wasn't through lengthy training programs or detailed manuals. Instead, a lieutenant just back from North Africa knelt on the P-40's wing, showed him where the levers were, and delivered what would become the defining philosophy of his career: "If you can get it started... go flying."
No manual. No formal training. Just pure learning by doing.
"I was 19 years old and thought I knew everything," Carr would later recall. "I didn't know enough to be scared. They just said: 'Go fly!' so I buzzed every cow in that part of the state. Nineteen years old and 1,100 horsepower, what did they expect?"
What they expected was for him to learn fast or not survive. With barely 160 hours of total flight time - less than today's basic civilian pilot's license requirements - Carr was pioneering the use of the P-51 Mustang in combat. "Flight training eventually became more formal," the records note, "but in those early days, it had a hint of fatalistic Darwinism: if they learned fast enough to survive... they were ready to move on to the next step."
The Ultimate Test
Shot down behind enemy lines in Czechoslovakia, exhausted and facing capture, Carr found himself in an impossible situation. After days of evading capture and wrestling with hunger, he spotted a German airfield at the forest's edge. His first thought was surrender - even POWs get to eat. Sometimes.
But as dusk approached, he noticed something that would change everything: a crew working on an FW-190, one of Germany's most advanced fighters. In that moment, facing death or capture, Carr made a decision that would define innovation under pressure: he would steal and fly an enemy aircraft he had never even sat in before.
Through the long night, huddled in the cockpit of the German plane, Carr began the methodical work of figuring out an alien system. He couldn't read German, couldn't decipher the dials, couldn't find familiar switches. But he could think. He could reason. He could map concepts across the boundaries of language and design.
"I began to think that the Germans were probably no different from the Americans," he reasoned. When switches weren't where he expected, he looked elsewhere. When pulling a control didn't work, he pushed instead. System by system, through logic and determination, he brought the foreign machine to life.
What followed was a harrowing flight across enemy territory, avoiding both German defenses and trigger-happy Allied gunners, all while flying an aircraft he was learning literally on the fly. He would become the only pilot known to leave on a mission in a Mustang and return in a Focke-Wulf.
The Modern Parallel
Today's founders face their own impossible situations. Like young Bruce Carr, they're often thrust into the cockpit of powerful new technologies with minimal preparation. The instructions, when they come, echo across time: "Here's artificial intelligence. Go build. Here's blockchain. Go create. Here's the future. Go fly."
Just as Carr had to map familiar aviation concepts onto unfamiliar German controls, today's innovators must visualize how new technologies map to human needs and possibilities. They're learning to fly in many occasions way before they think they're ready, figuring out alien systems through a combination of first principles thinking and pure determination.
The patterns are the same: Understanding fundamental systems. Mapping known concepts to unknown territories. Moving forward despite uncertainty. Every founder, at some point, finds themselves in that pre-dawn darkness, faced with unfamiliar instruments, trying to bring something new to life.
The Call to Action
In the most dire situations, humans can find a way. Whether it's through mastering new technology, creating innovation, building a team, or perhaps hardest of all, reinventing ourselves.
The market does not care about perfect preparation. But Bruce Carr's story shows us that this isn't a weakness. Success often means sitting in an unfamiliar cockpit, surrounded by controls you don't understand, and having the courage to figure it out anyway. For all I know, looking at foreign instruments and finding familiar patterns and pushing when pulling doesn't work, could be the formula?
The question isn't whether you're ready. The question is: When faced with the unfamiliar, will you wait for perfect conditions, or will you learn to fly?
"Don't await the perfection. Because if you do, that's all you'll do…wait." – Seneca
Innovation does not require having all the answers from the outset. But it requires courage to take the controls and learn as you go. Bruce Carr hadn't changed when he took off in that stolen German fighter. What had changed was his belief about what was possible.
Time to fly.
Thanks for reading. Read more on X (@alfviktr) & Substack (Creative Founder).
Great read 💯
Superb read brother 🚀🏴