wrote in message
oups.com...
There have been many stories told about the practice of cutting the
shirt of the freshly soloed pilot. None of them made any sense to me

They don't make any sense because they don't have to. Mrs. C is partly
right, but the tradition (in various forms) pre-dates airplanes. Always some
hokey story is made up to go along with the tradition. You get right down to
it, it is really a descendent of knights winning their spurs or getting
clapped on the shoulder, or in more modern times, the fifty mission crush or
ripping the knife pocket off the flight suit.

Cavalry officers sometimes used get their shirt tails cut when they received
their commissions (usually accompanied by some story about saddle sores or
something). Many of the earliest military aviators came from the cavalry.
So, you get some flight school that wants a relatively harmless form of
hazing its graduates, someone remembers what Granddad used to do in the
cavalry, and there you have it. Or they decided to follow some other ancient
military tradition, such as cutting off ties, but nobody wears ties, so....
The story is an afterthought. I have had students go out and buy a shirt
especially to solo in, and our school does not even follow that tradition.
The student invariably heard about somewhere else.