Badass of the Week is produced by High Five Content and Seven Bucks Productions.
June 18th, 1947. Midnight in the Syrian desert. The silence of the dunes is shattered by a terrifying shriek of twisting aluminum and roaring flames. Pan Am Flight 121, a massive four-engine Lockheed Constellation christened the Clipper Eclipse, suffers catastrophic engine failure, tears through the darkness at 200 mph, and slams into the desert floor. The impact rips the airliner in half, tumbling across the sand in an apocalyptic fireball of aviation fuel, molten metal, and choking black smoke.
Stumbling out of the shattered wreckage, bleeding from several cuts, suffering from two broken ribs, and spitting blood and dust, is a 25-year-old US Army Air Force pilot. He was a passenger on this flight, but he is a battle-hardened veteran, a decorated World War II combat pilot who had flown 89 combat missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress through the bullet-chewed skies of the South Pacific. He has dealt with more than his fair share of dangerous flights and plane crashes. Now staring at a roaring wall of flame in the Syrian wilderness, his training takes over. The aircraft is on fire. People are badly wounded. Many are unconscious. But he doesn't run for cover. He doesn't wait for rescuers who he knows are days away.
Even with the aircraft's hull melting in the searing heat and the fuel tanks on the verge of exploding, he dives straight back into the flaming fuselage. He crawls through the blinding, poisonous smoke, dragging dazed and burning passengers through the jagged holes in the torn hull.
When the flames completely engulf the cabin, preventing him from returning, he takes command of the survivors on the ground, setting up an emergency triage station, leading scouting parties across the desert dunes through territory controlled by hostile tribes, and walking miles through the blistering heat, refusing to give up or give in until he finally brings help to save those people who made it out of that crash alive.
This heroic pilot's name was Gene Roddenberry. After a career as a World War II hero and another career as an LAPD police officer, Roddenberry would create Star Trek, a universe founded on hope, exploration, and the unbreakable resilience of the human spirit. But on that night in the Syrian desert, Gene Roddenberry proved that he didn't just write about heroes — he was one.
Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week, the show where we tell the badass history of badasses. I am joined today by fellow badass and longtime friend of the show, Brandon Fibbs. Brandon, welcome back to the show. It's always great to have you.
Thank you. It's good to be back. Although, I don't think I've ever been introduced as a badass myself. So, I mean, I'll take this. I need to be on the show more often.
Yeah, yeah, of course. Everybody that comes on here is a badass. It's great. I get...
We all get a little bit of job inflation for being on the show.
There you go. I'm going to cut my... You were like a... You were in the Navy. I always want to call you a naval aviator and you always tell me that's not right, but you're a naval aviator adjacent.
Yeah, I always, as I always explain it to people, I was Goose in Top Gun. I sat right behind the pilot and operated the aircraft systems.
Right, and you work on spaceships and stuff, so that's all pretty cool.
I don't work on spaceships, but I do help send people to space these days. So, yeah, that is still pretty cool.
That's pretty cool. And so, you've always come on and we've done a lot of aviation badasses and space badasses and things like that. And you had been talking to Andrew, our producer, at some point, I think, because all I knew was about a week ago, I got a calendar notification that Brandon Fibbs is signed up to do a podcast episode on Gene Roddenberry next week. And I was like, I didn't even email you. I didn't text you or email. I was like, no further questions. We'll give it a shot. I don't know if Gene Roddenberry's a badass or not, but if Brandon says he is, we're going to do it. I'm picturing, you know, the photos that we see of him with the velour, you know, the velour vest and...
It doesn't... Yeah. Whatever image you have of Gene Roddenberry is probably not a badass, but you'll have a very different opinion by the end of this show.
Yes, yes. And so I did my research. I am, I think, up to date on what we're going to be talking about, but I think for the purposes of this episode, because it was so aggressively placed on my calendar, I feel like you should be in charge here of running this one. So, hey, let's pause right there for a second and do a real quick ad break. We'll be right back.
Okay, welcome back. Let's continue. So...
Yeah, happy to do it. And one of the things I wanted to share, of course, there's like one primary story that makes him a badass, but leading up to that is some cool history we should get into. But yeah, we'll just start at the beginning, the literal, the very beginning. So first there was the big... wait, not that beginning. So August 19th, 1921...
We already covered the foundation of the cosmos a couple episodes ago. So people are more or less up to speed when we're talking whatever, 1901, 1920, something like that.
August 1921. So dispel that whole idea, like you said, of the velour-wearing Gene Roddenberrys as you've seen him in all these pictures, and just, you know, we're going to go to the beginning. So it's August 18th, 1921. He is born in El Paso, Texas, but he grows up in Los Angeles where his father works for the LAPD. And he's one of these stories that we get so often with people in aviation. Fell in love with aviation as a little kid. By 18 he had earned his pilot's license. And at 20 years old, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army Air Forces because he signed up after Pearl Harbor. He wanted to serve. And so you have this guy, 20 years old, and he is assigned to the 394th Bomb Squadron, flying B-17 Flying Fortresses in the South Pacific. And if you've seen Masters of the Air or if you know your World War II history, these are the biggest bombers that America flew over Europe and over the Pacific. And his squadron did bombing missions throughout Guadalcanal and Fiji and all the Pacific Islands. And he has dicey encounters throughout his entire run as a member of the military. In fact, the whole group used to fly these bombing runs frequently without Allied fighter escorts. So the only way you fight back is the gunners, you know, in these little swivel turrets and stuff like that that these planes have.
Right, right. You've got like... it was like the B-17 had like two waist gunners, a nose, a tail, and a ball turret. And so, you know, you see all the movies and stuff about this and it's super cool. And like one thing to keep in mind here is that he's getting involved really early, right? Because he, you know, he joins up after Pearl Harbor and they basically take him like right away because a lot of these, they don't have to train him how to fly a plane because he already knows how to fly. He's only 20 years old, but not a lot of people who signed up right away could already fly. So he's like basically first wave out after Pearl Harbor.
And I can't imagine, like we have these days when we don't have these massive World War type situations, I cannot imagine putting a 20-something, 21-year-old whatever in the seat as the primary pilot in a massive bomber which has like what, 12, 14 people inside of it going all these runs. Like, people had to grow up fast, you know, in these kinds of scenarios for sure, and he was one of them. Oh yeah. So yeah, countless bombing missions throughout the Pacific, fighting, you know, attacking Japanese fighters. There's a story about how he had to escape into cloud cover or else they were all going to die. Stories, as you always find with like the B-17s, of anti-aircraft fire so thick, the flak so thick that the pilots talk about you could climb out of the plane and walk on it. And being in the Pacific typhoons, they almost crashed once because of being caught in the middle of a massive typhoon. So the story I want to share today is not this one, but this is a great lead-up to it because on August 2nd, 1943, Roddenberry is piloting a B-17 and it was named Yankee Doodle, and they're taxiing down the runway. They're getting ready to take off and something's wrong. He doesn't have enough power and he realizes that they're not gaining enough speed. They're never going to be able to take off. So he attempts to try to abort, but the aircraft wouldn't stop. And so Yankee Doodle goes off the end of the runway and it smashes into a bunch of trees and it crushes its entire nose and catches fire, and two men, the navigator and the bombardier, were killed because they sit in that forward area and they were crushed and killed. And an investigation clears them of any responsibility. It seemed to be some sort of aircraft mishap. But he and the other men on that crew blamed him for those deaths, and it was something that haunted him for a long time. So much so, and I...
It's like double mechanical failure. And this is like an island near Vanuatu. It's not a big runway. This is a very quickly made, smallest possible runway we can make. Smallest target, most, you know, kind of thing. This is not a huge island that has a big runway on it. You're, you know, no room for error.
No room for error. Yeah. And yeah, whether that be pilot error or mechanical error. And I don't know if this is the thing that inspired him to leave combat or not, but he ends up going back to the US. He's still in the service and he spends the rest of his military service as an air crash investigator and survives a military plane crash at some point in that. He's in a plane crash and survives that. So he's already lived this incredible life and he's still in his early 20s, and by the end of the war he's flown 89 combat missions and received a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal. So you...
89. Yeah. Right. So he gets out of the military and he does what a great many pilots who get out of the military do: becomes a commercial pilot for Pan American World Airways. And, you know, they're defunct now, but back in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, they were the biggest player in town. If you've ever seen the movie 2001, no one knew Pan Am was going to go out of business, and that's why you saw those Pan Am spacecraft docking on the space station and stuff like that. So...
Oh, right, right. So this is the point where our story really gets good because this is where we discover that Gene Roddenberry is a badass. Not because... well, obviously because he did 89 combat missions and stuff, but this story is the reason we're talking today. I saw a story of him like he was down three engines and they asked him... like he landed with one engine after having been shot at by Zeros and flak and all of that on some bombing run over Guadalcanal, I think. And they were like, yeah, he had like nerves of steel. He was just sitting there smoking a cigarette to calm himself down, landing the plane with one engine, all shot up by machine guns and cannons and flak.
I've told stories before about the B-17. One of the most famous is the headless B-17, in which a piece of flak tore the entire nose off of one of these B-17s, again killing the navigator and the bombardier, just ripped it right off and flung it back, suddenly exposing the two pilots to just looking straight out into space. They managed to get it off of the German flak attack. I think they were over Prague. And everyone was able to bail out and they all survived. But that's one of many stories. There's that almost exact same thing happened before, and they were able to fly the B-17 back and land it in England. Like these things were so good, so strong. These were extraordinary planes, extraordinarily stable planes. You could just bang them up, rip pieces off, and they still got their crews home. It was one of the more exceptional aircraft that America has ever designed.
Yes, absolutely. They should have their own episode probably.
Okay. And so he's out of the service and he's got 89, and he's working as a commercial pilot, flying...
And just to remind everybody that's saying that, you know, we're talking about the war and all this kind of stuff, he's still at this point only 25 years old. So, you know, he's not exactly an old man quite yet. And he's flying, it's June 18th, 1947, Pan Am Flight 121, and it takes off from Karachi, Pakistan, and it's going to Istanbul, Turkey, and eventually going to make its way back to New York. There are 36 people aboard, 10 of whom are crew members, and Roddenberry isn't even on duty. He's what they call in the industry deadheading. He's hitching a ride home. He has no assigned responsibilities. He's just a passenger like anyone else. Five hours into this 10-and-a-half-hour flight, the Lockheed Constellation in which they're flying in has an engine failure, and that's not normally a big deal. Like you were just talking about landing a B-17 with one engine. That's a big deal. But the Constellation, like that, has four engines, and that's it. You can fly it on three engines. The problem, however, is that those engines are working much harder, and they begin to overheat, and one of them suddenly catches fire.
Because you're in the desert. Exactly. And the crew activates a fire suppression system. They had them then just as we do now, but unfortunately it doesn't put out the fire. And the flames grow so hot that the engine's magnesium components ignite. And that creates a fire so intense you can't put that out with water. The conventional extinguishers can't put that out. And before long, this engine literally rips completely off the wing and flies away. And as it does so, it ruptures all of the fuel lines. And all of a sudden, the entire wing and half the plane is on fire. And so the captain realizes there's no way they're going to make it to any airfield. They are going to have to put this thing down in the desert. And they're currently at 14,000 feet over Syria.
And so obviously he's not on duty, but Roddenberry of course jumps up and starts taking over. He's in the cabin and he starts trying to calm the passengers and prepare them for the crash landing. He obviously knows what's going on. He knows the dire straits that they're in. So he actually even has the flight attendants buckle in, and then he starts going over all the crash procedures with the passengers and he's reassuring them that everything is going to be okay. They're all buckled in. He is not. Seconds later, the airplane slams into the desert. It rips in two. 15 people are killed instantly: eight passengers and seven crew members, including everyone in the cockpit, all the pilots and engineers. And because he's not strapped into a seat, he is thrown violently through the cabin, smashes into the forward wall, and breaks multiple ribs. However, he lives, and as the ranking surviving officer, he suddenly finds himself in charge. And despite all of his injuries, he starts pulling these screaming passengers from the burning wreckage. He pulls one out, he runs back in and gets another one, pulls them out, runs back in, gets another one. And he does this until the flames are so intense that he can't do it anymore. In fact, the last person he pulled from the fiery wreckage dies in his arms.
He is able to gather from the flotsam and jetsam of this plane crash some first aid supplies and an inflatable life raft. One of those big inflatable life rafts.
And the survivors inflate that. They flip it upside down and then they all huddle underneath it because again it's midday in the Syrian desert and everyone is baking in the sun. And at this point Roddenberry has no idea. He wasn't in the cockpit so he has no idea if the cockpit crew had managed to radio for help. You know, as far as he knows, they are in the desert. Nobody knows they're there and they have no idea where they are.
This is the prologue of a Star Trek movie or something, right? Like for real. Like you crash-landed on an alien planet. We have no idea where we are, how we got here, how to get off of here. Like a lot of people are hurt, people are injured, the climate is hostile, right?
Opening credits start to roll and you're like the cold open to an episode of Next Generation or something. Quite the cold open, right?
He is trying to tend to the survivors and they're all trying to huddle and stay out of the sun, and he notices something in the distance. He sees telegraph wires and he says to himself, 'Telegraph wires always lead to people.' And so he picks several members of these survivors that weren't injured, and he forms two search parties. And he basically says, 'I want this search party to go that direction down the wires and I want the other search party to go this direction down the wires and let me know if you find any human habitation.' And he stays behind to continue to tend to the wounded. And it's probably a good thing he does because at some point some local tribesmen appear and they actually end up robbing the bodies of the people that didn't survive, and they end up coming back again and they were going to do violence to the survivors, and Gene Roddenberry somehow talks them down and they agree just to rob them. So they end up robbing both the dead and the living of nearly everything they had left. So they are in even more dire straits than they were before.
And thank goodness, one of these search parties returns and they said, 'We found a town. We saw a town. It's about four miles away.' And at this point, he lets them rest, and Roddenberry hikes through the hot sand with all these broken ribs to a town called Maaden. And he finds the telephone and he summons for help. And then soon the Syrian army and ground troops are dispatched. They arrive on site, they rescue all the survivors, treat their wounds, and send them home. Roddenberry actually ends up spending several more weeks in Syria recovering, and he has to testify before a bunch of courts and tribunals and whatnot. But yeah, it's an amazing story. He saved the lives of all of these people through all of his quick thinking and everything. And he eventually after that... I'll pause here, editor, and ask Ben if he wants to summarize anything before we move on to the story because that's the end of the main crux of the story.
No, I mean, just that's like what a crazy story, right? I mean this guy has... it does sound like a movie, right? The guy is a trained veteran. He's the most experienced person there. This horrible tragedy happens. He's very, very seriously wounded, like you said, he had to be in the hospital for months, you said. And he's the one who's kind of got to take over here and keep these people alive in the desert. And you know, just the idea of like how demoralizing that people came and like, 'Oh, they're here to rescue us.' Like, no, no, they're here to rob us.
Like we're never going to make it out of here alive. And you know, just to be able to... just hiking four miles on two broken ribs or however many broken ribs you had. That's incredible.
Through sand, like you can imagine, like every footfall, you know, sinks, and how sand shifts beneath you, and how that would affect broken ribs.
Wow. Amazing. Gene Roddenberry. Who knew? We're going to stop right here for a second to hear an ad. So we'll be right back.
Okay, let's pick up where we left off. He's still like in his 20s and now we've survived multiple catastrophic aircraft accidents.
Yeah, at least two plane crashes, to say nothing of, of course, nearly getting shot down by Japanese Zeros multiple times in the Pacific and running into typhoons that nearly clobbered his plane. Like a lot, I mean, the kind of stories we're talking about are enough for one person's entire lifetime, let alone someone who's only lived a quarter of a century.
Right. So does he get out of airplanes at this point?
Not surprisingly, he gets out of airplanes. Yes. He leaves Pan Am shortly after that and he moves back to Los Angeles, and he doesn't exactly get into a safer job necessarily, per se. He, like his father, joins the LAPD and he's serving as...
I know, right? Exactly. You may not crash in planes, but yeah, certainly not safer. But what he ends up doing is he is assigned as the LAPD's technical adviser for Hollywood, like this liaison, to make sure that they're getting the stuff right. And he primarily works on a show called Dragnet, which was a very popular show in the '50s and was even remade as a comedy in the '80s. I think it was the '80s. I don't think it was early '90s.
In the '80s, with Tom Hanks.
Oh, why am I forgetting... Dan Aykroyd, who's trying to burrow out of my head.
Yeah. So Dan Aykroyd plays the lead in that. Tom Hanks is his partner. And so yeah, it was this hugely popular show. And it's while he's the adviser for this show that he discovers this passion for screenwriting, falls in love with Hollywood, falls in love with screenwriting. He starts trying his hand at it and supplies scripts for a number of television shows, a number of police procedurals, and eventually he decides to resign from the force full-time. And of course, as you know, bearing the lead, as if anyone doesn't know who Gene Roddenberry is, of course Gene Roddenberry then goes on to pitch the show that would make him a household name, and that is Star Trek.
Right, right. And so yeah, he is the technical adviser for the LAPD to Hollywood, but he's a beat cop before this, right? He's like a motorcycle cop, traffic enforcement. There's a story where this guy, he had to talk a jumper off a ledge one time and he got a commendation for that. He was, you know, handling everything from violent disturbances to traffic fatalities. He is seeing a lot of danger and violence and, you know, some scary stuff. And I love the idea that he like at some point was just like, 'I should write some of this down. Like I've seen so much stuff at this point.' And yeah, I mean, and then to have him kind of, especially at the time, right, we're looking at the 1960s TV shows, right? And they're like, 'This cop's going to act like this.' And for him to kind of come in there and be like, you know, he's 30-something at this point. He's got whatever, 20 years of experience watching, like actual combat experience, actual police experience. I imagine it was probably a little bit frustrating for him at times to come in there and have some Hollywood guy be like, 'Well, I read The Maltese Falcon. I'm going to write a cop story,' and for him to just be like, 'None of this is like what it's really like,' you know.
Right. Well, you know, the first thing they always tell writers is write what you know. And at this point, Gene, like you said, Gene Roddenberry is in his early 30s or he's in his 30s, he knows a lot, he's experienced a lot, and rather than try to translate that into like war TV shows or stuff like that, he just takes these ideas of adventure and peril and heroism and stuff like that, and of course translates that into, as he described, Star Trek, Wagon Train to the Stars, as it was known at the time, because it was like a Western set in space.
Oh, interesting. Yeah, because he writes some Westerns too. He writes a couple Bat Mastersons and Have Gun – Will Travel, stuff like that.
I mean, Westerns at this time, at the time Star Trek came out, Westerns are dominant. Like almost every show on TV is a Western at this time. So yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And so I love that he's just like a beat cop during the day and then he goes home and he writes scripts. Like it's, I don't know, I think that's so cool. And then they end up... he ends up pitching Star Trek, but Star Trek, if I can remember correctly, is not a hit like right away.
No, in fact, NBC... So the first pilot, NBC didn't like it. It's one of the weird situations. I don't know if there's ever been a situation like this. NBC rejects the pilot that they shot, but likes the concept of it enough that they say, 'Rewrite it. Do a complete page-one rewrite and make another pilot.' And the only character to survive that page-one rewrite is Spock. And they bring on all the regular cast that you now know and love today from the original series, but none of those were in the original pilot. It was Captain Pike and Number One and all the characters that you can now see on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds currently airing, because that show has gone back and basically said, 'Hey, we've got all these adventures of this crew that was flying around on the USS Enterprise before Captain Kirk and the other guys took over. So let's tell their story.' So that's what's happening right now.
