  We studied the distribution of World War I fighter pilots by the number of
victories they were credited with, along with casualty reports. Using the
maximum entropy method we obtained the underlying distribution of pilots by
their skill. We find that the variance of this skill distribution is not very
large, and that the top aces achieved their victory scores mostly by luck. For
example, the ace of aces, Manfred von Richthofen, most likely had a skill in
the top quarter of the active WWI German fighter pilots and was no more special
than that. When combined with our recent study (cond-mat/0310049), showing that
fame grows exponentially with victory scores, these results (derived from real
data) show that both outstanding achievement records and resulting fame are
mostly due to chance.
