LIFT-TICKET. The code name used by U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Victor W. Sikorski. Lift-Ticket joined the Army to get out of his hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma. What made him different was the fact that his scores on the aptitude test were so high that he qualified for West Point Prep, Officer Candidate School (OCS) and Flight Warrant Officer School. No one in his hometown had expected Lift-Ticket was that smart, including himself. He opted for Flight School, seeing it as the only position with skills that could apply to civilian employment. Lift-Ticket became know for being skilled and persistant enough to get to a landing zone amidst enemy fire. Adding that to his apparent good luck made the G.I. Joe team take notice and offer him a position flying their new Tomahawk assault and rescue helicopter. Lift-Ticket was put into immediate action with the Joes, transporting one portion of their invasion force during the Battle of Springfield. For the next several years, Lift-Ticket and his Tomahawk took part in many operations. He delivered a group of Joes to the top of a glacier in Greenland, transported wounded Joes and stolen Terror-Drome components in Sierra Gordo, ferried Joes from Fort Wadsworth to the new Pit in Utah and rescued a small team from a near-disastrous mission into Southeast Asia.During the Joes involvement in the Cobra Island civil war, Lift-Ticket's Tomahawk, carrying several Joes was hit by enemy fire as it off-loaded them on the ground. Lift-Ticket was injured in the attack and was out of commission for the rest of the battle. It wasn't long before he made a full recovery and served as co-pilot aboard a C-130 transport plane, bringing a group of Joes to a newly-formed, unstable island to prevent Cobra from claiming it as a second Cobra Island. A short time after that mission, Lift-Ticket and a number of Joes flew a Tomahawk rescue chopper into Southeast Asia to pick up four Joes who had been on a long mission since before the Cobra civil war. The aircraft went up against Russian attack helicopters and was nearly shot down before the team reached their objective and picked up their teammates. Lift-Ticket continued on with the team for years on various dangerous missions, including the Joes' biggest operation yet, the Battle of Benzheen. At one point he even accomplished a believed-to-be impossible feat by barrel-rolling his helicopter to save Joes that fell from the top of the Cobra Consulate in New York. He remained on the team until it was shut down in 1994. Years later, he again served with the Joes during their mission to stop terrorist Tyler Wingfield and joined the team's invasion of Cobra Island to battle the forces of a revived Serpentor.
(GI 49, 56, 62, 65, 73, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81, 82, 86, 93, 96, 98, 111, 113, 116, 117, 125; SM 2, 8, 16, 18, 19, 23, 28; GIv2 24; FL 12; AE 15; Figure: 1, 2)