The Chewing Gum Fix
Frank Cauley was an Ottawa boy who served with the RCAF in WWII. One day he and his Sunderland Flying Boat crew were sent out to find and destroy a U-Boat. This they did, but not before the enemy nearly returned the favour, raking the bottom of the Sunderland with machine gun fire.
Limping away from the encounter, the crew began to appreciate the gravity of their situation: far out over the Atlantic, the hull of their craft was riddled with thirty-six bullet holes, mostly below the waterline. Given they would have to set down on water, this was not good.
How do you waterproof a bullet-riddled hull? The flight engineer had an idea: every airman had in his kit five sticks of chewing gum, so the crew was ordered to start chewing. After the holes were stuffed with the sticky stuff, the plane was taken up to an elevation where the gum froze in place. Perhaps not elegant, but effective.
The Sunderland was nursed back to its base on Lough Erne, where the gum held long enough to bring the craft down safely.
While it’s unlikely any of us will ever need to try that exact trick, we can all take a lesson. Chewing gum may not be the solution to your problem, but something unconventional may be.
Cauley and his crew had a stark situation, “We’re in a boat with wings, and that boat is full of holes. When we land, we’ll sink.” By stating our problems at their starkest, potential solutions begin to appear. Just don’t expect extraordinary problems to have obvious solutions.
Here’s a link to an interview with Frank Cauley. (http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/1262:frank-cauley/)