Is Steve Rogers Cursed? Most Fans Say They’d Rather Not Fly with Captain America
Captain America from the Marvel Cinematic Universe still stands as the true emblem of Americana in superheroes, perhaps even more so than Superman. His skills are also considered just as superior thanks to being a willing ’40s-era participant in taking Super Soldier Serum.
His flight skills, though, are maybe in question. If Cap can run faster than anybody and fight in intense ground battles, some fans facetiously say Steve Rogers’ ability to fly usually ends in disaster.
How much truth is there to this? There is some truth to the notion every time Cap pilots an aircraft, it ends up crashing. Then again, fans also note some explanation is needed on why those crashes occurred.
Was Cap really cursed whenever he became a pilot?
If there was a curse, it started when Cap crashed into the Arctic
Perhaps Marvel had to acknowledge Rogers’ ill-fated WWII flight while working for Strategic Scientific Reserve. Through the SSR, Rogers became a war hero thanks to his ground combat and piloting skills.
Joining the Howling Commandos became a fictional Band of Brothers who fought numerous battles against HYDRA.
That iconic mission of Rogers trying to stop his plane carrying bombs heading to the U.S. became a turning point. Perhaps it made Rogers look all the more human in deciding to crash his plane into the Arctic Ocean.
From there, he stayed preserved for six decades until resurrected in the 21st century by SHIELD. Perhaps one can say Cap was cursed by that plane crash, even if it allowed him to help save the world, not including being able to go back to live his old life with Peggy Carter anyway.
Before getting there, though, he ran into a number of incidents where piloting an aircraft never worked out so smoothly.
MCU fans recently ribbed how many air crashes Captain America had
Recently, someone on Reddit started a thread compiling all the photos of the times Cap crashed aircraft throughout all The Avengers movies. There were at least half-a-dozen moments where this happened.
Nevertheless, some fans were quick to point out not all of those were complete accidents. And one of them involved him merely riding along (in space with the Guardians of the Galaxy) where nothing bad really happened.
As one Reddit user noted: “And in two of those three scenarios pictured, he was trying to take them down. It wasn’t like he was shitty at flying”. Others are not so sure since a few of them were literal crashes without Cap dying in the process.
Maybe one can argue since Cap was used to 1940s-era planes, piloting newer aircraft with higher tech was a bit more of a learning curve.
Steve Rogers’ original plane crash was not really a curse
Over on Quora, someone asked why Rogers never jumped out of his plane carrying the bombs before crashing into the Arctic ice. Someone answered with a long and astute observation that Rogers was strategizing on how to prevent the plane from crashing into the port of New York where the plane was headed.
Red Skull put the plane on a direct course for New York, forcing Rogers to make a sacrificial decision to ensure the plane would never get there. To do this, he had to crash the plane himself rather than jump out.
In other words, Rogers made the ultimate heroic move, certainly not something one would say was a curse. All the subsequent crashes were maybe just little in-jokes to his bad fortune from initially crashing a plane.
Fans at least have fun with this. They now place Cap in the pantheon of people like Tom Hanks who also had his movie characters seemingly have bad luck with anything related to flying.
