Teaching the Teachers

Last week the fast-greying generals whose job it is to train astronomical numbers of young men to fly delicate complex machines thought they might have hit upon a way to save some of the young men from dying early, some of the machines from being smashed. Hard-pressed to turn out more pilots quicker,* the Flying Command scheme is simple: teach the teachers. Throughout his huge, 56-station Southeast Training Command, Major General Ralph Royce has set up Advisory Training Boards (formerly called Flying Evaluation Boards) to comb over the instructors, re-educate them if necessary.

The idea had its inception last spring at the burgeoning new twin-engine advance flying school near Columbus, Miss. Columbus' stand-by plane is the Lockheed Hudson (A29) trainer-bomber, used in the transition between advance trainers and the really "hot" twin-engine bombers like the fast-flying, fast-landing Martin 6-26.

Columbus' commandant, Colonel Louie Clifford Mallory, set his training director, 40-year-old Lieut. Colonel Joseph B. Duckworth, to find the nearest thing there is to an antidote for accidents. Georgia-born Joe Duckworth, who had piled up 12,500 hours' flying time, mostly in a decade of service with Eastern Air Lines, soon decided that too often the teachers were undertaught.

The system that sent a twin-engine instructor out as a four-engine Flying Fortress co-pilot after he had flown a few hundred hours also brought in instructors who had been cadets only too recently. Combat pilots do not rate the Lockheed Hudson hard to handle, but it is mighty hot to fledglings whose most advanced experience has been in an AT-₉. Yet "The Duck" found instructors who had flown Hudsons only two or three hours. Joe Duckworth was horrified. Two years ago they would not let a man sit in a bomber before he had flown 1,000 hours.

Pilots circulated rumors: "The Hudson is full of green dragons." Reported Colonel Duckworth: "The idea got around that if one motor went out, you were about gone. The boys were letting the airplane fly them--they were not flying the airplane." Stalls, followed by crashes, resulted when green instructors and students climbed too rapidly after the takeoff.

Colonels Mallory and Duckworth set up rules: No man could become an instructor until he had six months' experience as a pilot, 300 hours on a twin-engine plane, two hours' cockpit instrument checking.

They established a board (usually four men) to evaluate instructors, reteach them basic elements of flying twin-engine planes. (Typical comment: "I learned little things that were not put across to me when I was a cadet. . . .")

Columbus' board had calls from the big fields at Albany and Valdosta, Ga., found the same elemental instructor defects there and at Gulf Coast stations. Pilots began flying from the Pacific Coast to be checked out by the Columbus board. Between May, before Columbus started checking up on instructors, and October the accident rate at the station dropped 44%, though the number of students doubled and the number of students-per-instructor rose from two to three and one-half.

*Since 1940 the Army pilot-training period has dropped from one year to eight months to six months.

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