Warbird Information Exchange

While its true that fighters had to be flown by 200 hour aviators, you also gotta remember that the Air Corp alone lost over 15,000 people in training crashes stateside. This doesn't count Naval aviation losses.

Steve G

Quite true. However those were fatalities during wartime training conditions. We had to churn out thousands of pilots; training was sped up and and corners were cut.

Also, I don't know how many, but I'm sure many of those fatalities occurred during Primary training and early solo flights and many were due to reasons that had nothing to do with flying ability (mechanical failure, bad chutes, pushing one's luck or plain bad luck, for example).

I'll have to disagree with that statement. The US didn't cut corners in flight training. Ask any Luftwaffe student in 1944-45 what it was like to have P-51s in the pattern with them P-51 vs AR-96 was much of a contest The last US ace Oscar Perdoma shot down 5 Japanese who (according to sqd CO Jim Jarman) who could barely keep'em in the air. In fact Perdomo's last kill was a Willow bi-plane trainer.

_________________
Don't touch my junk!!

There may have been times in the war when training was rushed, especially for Japanese or German pilots the last year, maybe even RAF in desperate times at the first of the battle.
But I have flown with several pilots who went through pilot trainng in the USAAC and they were very good. Each of these guys got at least 60 hours of T-6/SNJ before moving on to fighters/bomber/transports. Their instructors would have been a lot better than the typical early 20 year old with a few hundred hours of Cessna time that we often see now.
I have read detailed accounts of the instructon cadets had before becoming an RAF pilot and it was very thorough. It would start in something like a Tiger Moth and go through a Master and Harvard before the Spit or Hurri or Lanc., and it wasn't just simulated, it had plenty of slow flight, stalls, spins, engine out landings, formation, and acro. Read Geoffery Wellum on this, or the book on Pat Pattle. It was flying, not much talking on the radio or playing with glass cockpits,or computing odd CG questions, or airspace FARs. And the instructors in some cases were WWI combat vets.

_________________
Bill Greenwood
Spitfire N308WK

I've also had the opportunity to fly with and grade a fair selection of pilots trained under the war training program. I would grade these pilots on the average very good and well trained.

There was a common denominator present in the training program of the day that was based on a strict time line vs the required learning curve. Much time was spent by Training Command figuring out what actually had to be mastered and what could be tweaked out and refined after a pilot moved on through the system.

Everything considered, it was a good system and things worked. There was attrition of course but not unacceptable attrition under the circumstances.

What all this amounted to was giving a pilot just enough to allow him to handle the next plane up the ladder and grade that pilot overall on this being learned and demonstrated while ALSO grading the pilot on whether or not Training Command believed due to the pilot's general attitude and receptiveness to learning, that what would be needed to complete the applicant into a capable combat pilot after graduation would be forthcoming with exposure and experience.

It wasn't an ideal system by a long shot, but it worked. The general gist of what I got when I interviewed some of these pilots was that the first time they strapped on something like a 51 or a B17, they all felt they were marginal but as time went on, they "adjusted" and did exactly what Training Command thought they would do; they became a finished product through OJT.

_________________
Dudley Henriques
International Fighter Pilots Fellowship

Yes, that's it. A friend of mine just bought Mr Dieno's (nice guy btw) 180hp Decathalon and I went over to pick it a couple of weeks ago and ferry it home and saw the Mustang then. Unfortunately besides the crash damage it had a lot of forklift and salvage damage. Big job - do able - but a big job.

A quick look in my Dad's logbook shows:

1) 19 hrs J-3
2) 64 hrs PT-17
3) 71 hrs BT-13
4) 80 hrs T-6
5) 10 hrs P-40
6) 132 hrs B-17

Plus a lot of Link and ground school. This all stateside before Atlantic crossing.

Steve G

I think you took my, admittedly short, statement a little further than it was meant:

"corners cut" doesn't mean "turned into a lousy program".

I didn't mean to imply the training was deficient and certainly not less than German or Japanese training programs.

But I am saying that the training syllabus was shortened as the war went on, partly due to the need for pilots. I have a couple of pilot biographies where they make that claim, and, if I recall correctly, explained where corners were cut. I believe at least one said he went into action nver shooting at a target sleeve.

If I can find them I'll post them.