Chapter 10 Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder!

Beginning to Fly – Meet the Fairchild PT 19

We learned to fly in the Fairchild PT 19 and the BC-1. The rugged little PT 19 was a one engine trainer aircraft. It had two open cockpits, the instructor sat behind you. It had plywood wings, fixed landing gear and flew at the phenomenal speed of about 130 mph! In truth, this was fairly slow for a light weight plane. The PT was also pretty stable, two positive factors for would-be pilots. Because of the open cockpit, the wind and colder temperatures the higher you flew, we were fitted out in two piece flying suits with fur collars, lined gloves, warm felt boots and leather helmets with goggles. (When we weren’t wearing the goggles, they were to be worn around our necks. Once we had completed our first solo flight we could wear them on our helmet.) Later, when we were overseas, our flying suits would have heated pants liners, heated jacket liners and heated gloves but for now we were so excited we didn’t notice the cold.

In addition to actual flying time every afternoon we were attending ground school and continuing our physical training during the first half of the day. We were also being thoroughly taught “military indoctrination” (the name of the course).

I was lucky to be assigned to a great instructor who stuck with me even though I was getting air sick just about every time I went up. I still remember my instructor’s name was William Dwyer. We were learning all the fundamentals: take offs, landings, forced landings, “s turns,” stalls, spins, loops etc. After about 24 hours of training with the instructor he told me to take my first “solo” flight which consisted of 3 or 4 take offs and landings. I was one of the first cadets in the class to do his solo and was quite proud to go back to the barracks wearing my goggles on my helmet.

The worst part of this training was when we started doing acrobatics. After training with the instructor for several days I would go up by myself and do several snap rolls, get sick, then go back and do it all over again. It took about forty hours of flying time before I got over the airsickness but it never bothered me again after that.