By popular demand (and by “popular demand” I mean N8), I’m shedding some light on “check 6.”
It’s actually a bit of pilot lingo I picked up from my Daddio, who used to be a fighter pilot for the Indiana Air National Guard and a corporate pilot for GTE (pre-Verizon, see). As a fighter pilot, the pilots would tell each other to “check” a location by referring to the position of the number on the face of a clock. So, “check 6″ literally meant to watch out directly behind you, but it was also more colloquially used to say, “Check your 6,” meaning, “Watch your own butt” sort of.
I’ve never been a pilot, but I did grow up thinking that all things pilot-related were cool, because my Dad was a pilot, and of course, my Dad is cool. For instance, I was also enthralled with learning (and then using, to an annoying degree) the phonetic alphabet too, because that’s how I heard my Dad spell things out: Delta Oscar Golf, for example, is D-O-G. When pilots communicate via their radio transmissions, certain letters can sound alike (“s” and “f”; “e” and “c”; etc.) so they use the phonetic alphabet, which is essentially assigning a standard word to represent each letter, and they can spell things out for each other that way.
So, “check 6″ is one of those things I picked up from Dad. It’s just sort of a closing, like saying “take care” in a different way. “Check 6″, as in, take care of yourself, watch your back, cover your ass, etc.
SIDENOTE: In the phonetic alphabet, the letter “c” is Charlie, and the letter “p” is Papa. On the last flight my Dad had before my brother Charles was born, part of the flight tower’s transmission to my Dad’s plane was “Charlie Papa.” And Mom and Dad never found out if they were having a boy or a girl before we were actually born, so Dad didn’t even know at the time that the transmission had a touch of fortune cookie-ness. Neat, huh?
SIDENOTE 2: My Dad flew F-4 Phantoms. He was in pilot training at Williams Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona, when I was born. To this day, the little F-4 Phantom mascot guy symbolizes “cool,” because I relate it to my Dad in his piloting days. And they shut town Willie (the air force base), so I was born somewhere that no doesn’t even really exist. Neat again, eh?
SIDENOTE 3: My Dad loved and still loves airplane nose art. You’ve seen the planes (jets, typically) that have, say, eyes and a mouth painted on the nose? Well, that’s nose art. My Dad painted a nose of a jet once, with a fierce cartoon-ish mouth and eyes, and someone took a photograph of that plane, and it wound up in the center of a book on nose art! Dad doesn’t get credited for the artwork, that I’m aware of, but I believe that his name is on the plane, or he recognized the names of the pilots painted on the plane to know that was his artwork. Either way, that’s damn neat too.
And with that bit o’ knowledge, I bid you adieu… and Check 6!
Labels: -FAVORITES-, anecdotes and opinions, family
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I’m Marissa, can-do-ologist, perpetual Curious George, and daily adventurer. 
