Anyone remember the USAF's recent RFP for Super Heroes? (Flight International, March 18-24). Well according to Nephew Pete George, it is based on the tried and tested "Captain Zero" experiment of 30 or more years ago. "Captain Zero, the hero of the USAF's 'Zero Defects' programme to improve quality, would swoop down onto an auditorium stage on a wire and present a certificate to some civil service secretary for only making 343 typos in a letter," he says.
The programme was apparently ended when Captain Zero hit the stage one day with an excessively great rate of descent. The broken wire was, naturally, later traced to a quality control defect.
Source: Flight International