Tintin Forums

I was wondering how Skut would be allowed to fly a plane of any kind with only one good eye?

The only answer I can think of is he could be hired by individuals to fly private planes, as he did for Carreidas, but commercial airlines would likely not hire him.

Yet it's strange that he would be permitted by anyone to fly and engage in combat in a fighter plane, as in The Red Sea Sharks.

He must have been an exceptional pilot.

After thinking about Skut's eye-patch for few days, I think it's actually very cleverly done by Hergé.
Skut is clearly a "good" guy and also seems able in his profession, yet he works for the "bad" guys.

I think the eye-patch explains it perfectly: with less-than perfect health he's forced to work for the "bad" guys if he wants to be a pilot anymore. I wonder what kind of history Hergé had imagined for the guy? I don't think the eye-patch was just a sudden idea...

For passenger airlines, I think that the standards are very stringent for eyesight (other lives, often hundreds, can be lost at the instant of an error), so Skut probably never flew anything that carried large numbers of passengers (funny that I once saw an aviation video where a 737 pilot is seen wearing glasses while flying). At the same time, however, small craft and non-commercial (military included) are probably not so strict, so Skut could have always been flying small planes, cargo aircraft, and fighters. Perhaps he was also a mercenary.

The "good guy"-"bad guy" thing is not bad, either...

I think that U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager flew for a while with an eye-patch after he lost his eye in a test flight crash (the one which was shown during the titles for the Six Million Dollar Man show, and one of the reasons that Martin Caidin gave Col. Steve Austin the bionic eye), although the only photos I could see in a cursory sweep of Google show him with a glass prosthetic (not bionic, I fear). Anyway, it's not a definite grounding thing.

Also, I think that the pilots of 'planes dropping nuclear bombs were given eyepatches, which they wore, in case they were blinded by the flash; the patch would guard at least one eye from damage. They were expected to swap the patch to the damaged eye, and fly on with the good one... (gulp!)
Maybe Skut was involved in some cold war nuclear piloting?

Update 15/05/2006: It would seem that I inadvertantly conflated two incidents here, and made some fundamental errors.

Although Chuck Yeager came down quite spectacularly, it is not the crash shown in the Six Million Dollar Man; it is represented in the film and book The Right Stuff.

Also he did not lose the sight in his eye - the damage was not permanent, due in part to the heat of the fire baking blood over his socket, which in turn probably saved the eye. His eyesight was unimpared, and he flew without problems after he recovered.

The pilot who crashed in the test film used in TSMDM was in fact Bruce A. Peterson, a NASA test pilot and engineer, who did lose an eye, and did keep flying after he was "rebuilt" - for much less than $6m, he reckoned.
The M2-F2 experimental 'plane shown was travelling at over 250mph when it hit the dry lake bed and crashed.

Sadly, although he was featured in a BBC documentary just this very weekend, Mr Peterson died at the start of May 2006.

There is a nice NASA (pre-crash!) picture of Yeager, Peterson and the M2-F2 here.

It seems like there were a few RAF aces during the Second World War who wore eye-patches, too, now that I think of it. I'll look it up this weekend.

It wouldn't surprise me if the example of Chuck Yeager was what Hergé was using in the first place.

Truth be told, I would think the brain can readjust itself if you were to lose vision in one eye. You know how people who go completely blind find their other senses become very heightened? Maybe that's the same case. Also, the whole RAF lead seems to be right as well.

Maybe the idea was to break stereotypes. A lot of times in comics, you'll notice that people associate a physical difference (ex. an eye patch!) with a villain. Hergé turned that one on its head with Skut, who ended up being a true friend and all-around solid brother.

One BBC site I read describing him said "Despite not always knowing what's going on around him, he always tries to do what he thinks is right." Maybe that could be the idea too?

Courtney

I think Skut could have been a good character that could have been developed further if the series went on. Hergé was a master at introducing characters that would return years later in other albums.