Help understanding US Army Air Force pilot training

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cwebster4

Airman
43
16
Feb 6, 2025
Jacksonville, Fla
I'm researching a pilot who joined the Army AF from the Miami area. Went on to Flight School for B-24s at Chatham Airfield in Savannah, Ga.
Was there a typical route for training?
Was there a basic Training, Advanced training, Flight school, Bomber school?
Where there typical routes for pilots that ended in Chatham?

I can't figure it out
Charlie
 
cwebster4 said:
Thank you. So can I surmise from this that pilots did not undergo any "traditional" army basic training?
I just finished reading The Wild Blue and didn't see any mention of traditional basic training

Thank you
Click to expand...
Yes, for most. But keep in mind that training changed a lot over the war, especially 1938 through 1943. The training system was scaling up about 100 fold (from500 pilots per 6 months to, at peak, 50,000) so not surprisingly there was a lot of scrambling. For example some early enlisted were sent home for several months to wait for an open slot. Others were sent to training in being an officer, which included close order drill and other traditional training.

Also, there were a zillion temporary sites for training.
 
For a thorough description check out Rebecca Cameron's book. It was also published as a government report, in full, and is therefore available as a free PDF if you look around. Note that it is only Army and AAF — Navy training is not mentioned anywhere!

Training to Fly: Military Flight Training, 1907 - 1945


By Rebecca Cameron
692 pages
"Training to Fly: Military Flight Training, 1907-1945," is an institutional history of flight training by the predecessor organizations of the United States Air Force. The U.S. Army purchased its first airplane, built and successfully flown by Orville and Wilbur Wright, in 1909, and placed both lighter- and heavier-than-air aeronautics in the
 
In 1937, as I was told, my father tested for USAAC, The Forest Service, and the Justice Dept. He was rejected by USAAC because the knuckle of his little finger, left hand was stiff because of a pocket knife cut while younger. Forest Service was full, so he was accepted to the FBI to become a fingerprint specialist. The rejection may have allowed my existence, as just a few years later, the stiff knuckle was not a rejection. The time line, if he had made it to USAAC, may well have put him to P.I. or H.I. by 1940-41.
 
Thank you for this information. I was happy to locate a copy of the book and will await its arrival. I'm sure this book will provide answers to all my questions.

Charlie
 
The flight training was done as follows:
1) Primary Flight Training: 65 - 225 hp, fixed gear, fixed pitch prop
2) Basic Flight Training: 350 - 450 hp, fixed gear, fixed gear, fixed pitch prop
3) Advanced Flight Training: 550 - 600 hp, retractible gear, controllable prop
4) Then bomber or fighter courses leading to graduation and assignment to a training squadron where you lean to operate the planes used in combat
5) Familiarization training with your eventual squadron
6) Combat flying, first as wingman and, as you get experience, as an element or flight lead. From there, it depends ...
 
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The AAF collection site and several others contain class booklets for many of the various bases and I would expect a little research may find the books for Chatham Airfield and any other bases that he was known to be at - maybe even for the period he was at those bases.
 
If you're looking at a specific individual, you should be able to get their service records from the National Archives or the Army.
 
A good idea unless their records were kept in St Louis and destroyed by the fire there in the 50s. Well worth the effort to find out as St Louis only held a small percentage of the records.
 
I just tried to get to the aafcollection.info site and all I got was promos for gambling -- which usually only happens when a site has died.

Is anyone else getting to their site or is it missing for you as well?
 
I found this on the web a couple of weeks back and it is raining so I thought I would read it. It set of a bunch of alarm bells very quickly.

I know the USAAF were way behind the eightball because by late 42 the Brits had three years actual combat experience but the Americans had less than a year so had some catching up to do but...

Other peoples thoughts would be appreciated.
 

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If you were to be a pilot, you started in single-engined airplanes to learn to fly, advanced to either fighter, bomber, or cargo training. The latter two had both coursework and flightwork on twins, so another couple of months. Then transition to operational type, put the crew together, and start learning in earnest.

If you were other aircrew, i.e. bombardier, navigator, or gunner, you went to the tech school for your specialty, and then got crew-assigned for operational-type training as above.

Basic military training happened for a lot of these guys. Maybe only a few weeks learning "to the rear, march" and "parade rest", but my impression is that these guys were hustled through the soldiering bit and stuck quickly into "your flying mission" bit.
 
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