Trouble in the Air

First Lieut. Verne Goodwin, 30, was running a Buick agency at Las Cruces, N. Mex. when he was recalled to active duty as a pilot in the Air Force. A World War II veteran whose wife was expecting a child, he applied almost immediately for a ground job. He said that he had become afraid of flying. The Air Force turned down his request. Last December, when he was ordered to fly to England as copilot of a C124 cargo plane, Goodwin refused to obey. Last week at Biggs Air Force Base, Texas, a court-martial sentenced him to two years' hard labor and ordered him cashiered.

Pilot Goodwin's story was no isolated case. At Randolph Field, Texas and Mather Field, Calif, last week, twelve other officers (navigators, bombardiers and one pilot) were also facing courts-martial for refusing to fly. At bases all over the nation scores more were flying under bitter protest.

The Stay-Downers. All of the "stay-downers," like Goodwin, are reserve officers, most of them World War II combat veterans with growing families, mortgages and civilian careers. Besides their personal problems, they complain that regular officers are hogging the soft stateside jobs while reservists go to Korea, that the planes they must fly are often poorly maintained. Flying, said one, "has developed into a poison for me." Others are simply disgusted with the Korean stalemate. Said one stay-downer: "We don't see any sense in giving our lives for a cause that even the civilians are completely apathetic toward."

The Air Force saw the whole affair in a somewhat different light. The reluctant flyers all knew that they were subject to combat duty when they chose to retain their reserve commissions--and thus draw a monthly paycheck from the Air Force, plus earning a generous Government retirement pension. Some of them came back into service voluntarily. And most of the sit-downers seemed to get that way just as they were about to be sent to Korea.

The Pentagon's first impulse was to throw the book at them. "A tempest in a teapot," snorted Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenberg. But as the proportions of the trouble became apparent last week, Vandenberg flew out to Randolph for a first-hand checkup, ordered court martial proceedings dropped in the cases of two flyers.

Faded Glamour. The unpleasant truth seemed to be that the stay-downers were a symptom of a whole complex of problems. For one thing, flying has become so commonplace that the call of the wide blue yonder has lost some of its appeal to the nation's youth. This year, for the first time, fewer than the allowable 25% of the graduating classes at West Point and Annapolis volunteered for flying training.

Like many another U.S. defense problem, the stay-downers are also a product of the Administration's muscle-cutting policy before Korea. Lacking funds, limited in the planes it could order, the Air Force had trained only 3,620 new pilots when the war broke out. As a result, 80% of the Air Force's 46,000 pilots today are reservists. Their average age is 31 (compared with 22 1/2 during World War II); attrition because of age, physical disability and other legitimate reasons for grounding the reserve flyers is running at more than 2,500 badly needed pilots a year.

Though the Air Force stopped involuntary recall of reservists five months ago, the U.S. will still have to depend on its World War II veterans for many months to come. Said one Air Force officer last week: "I'll bet Joe Stalin is reading the papers and laughing with glee."

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