Education: Scholar’s Wings

“Due to crowded conditions and in the interests of safety,” President Wyatte Dawson Guthrie of Long Island’s Roosevelt Field fortnight ago ordered no more flying there in training planes weighing less than 1,500 pounds. His order provoked a crisis in four flying schools which were training 135 college boys and girls as part of the Civil Aeronautics Board’s nationwide pilot-training program for U. S. youth. Safair Inc. promptly grabbed National Airport at nearby Hicksville for its 60 students. The other three schools pooled their resources, graded, reconditioned, and in record time christened the East Meadow Auxiliary Field. There last week their students were once more soaring and zooming as CAB’s first summer training season got under way throughout the U. S.

By last week the CAB program, adopted by 435 universities and colleges from Harvard to Hawaii, had become one of the biggest Government-subsidized enterprises in the history of U. S. education. It had spent $4,000,000 in its first year training 9,810 student fliers. Last month, with $30,000,000 more to train 45,000 fliers by June 15, 1941, it had also become a major and well-developed part of the U. S. effort for national defense.

CAB pays participating colleges $50 for each student who takes the 72-hourground course which begins his training.

Students may be charged up to $40 by their colleges as a “laboratory fee,” get the rest free. Flight instruction is farmed out to some 700 private flying schools, to which CAB pays $325 a student for the elementary course. Most schools use tan dem training planes with a cruising speed of 70 m.p.h., but the Stanford unit is experimenting with a spin-proof plane equipped with tricycle landing gear and other safety features. Its first year completed with only one fatality, CAB was rewarded by a 30% reduction in premiums on the insurance it now carries for every student ($3,000 life, $500 hospitalization).

CAB airmen are chosen from students (and a few nonstudents) aged 18 to 26. Girls are limited to 3% of each class. All pass a strict physical examination, and applicants under 21 must have their parents’ consent. Students finishing the first installment of flying instruction have from 35 to 50 hours in the air, get a special Civilian Pilot Training certificate which licenses them to fly their own planes. This summer 1,000 promising students will be given $750 worth of secondary instruction. CAB also gives refresher courses to its primary instructors, and to rusty private and commercial pilots who want to keep their hand in.

Spark plug of the pilot training program is quiet-mannered, businesslike Assistant Secretary of Commerce Robert H. Hinckley, who this March, as tsar of U. S. commercial aviation, celebrated its first year with no airline fatalities, a record which helped him sell jittery Congressmen on a bigger civilian training program for 1940-41. Bob Hinckley took his first airplane ride with pioneer German aviatrix Melli Beese when he was touring Europe as a Mormon missionary. Expelled from Germany because his gospel was believed to be disturbing the peace, he returned to the U. S. to found the Utah-Pacific Airlines and begin preaching another: the future of aviation. To Mr. Hinckley, a “formidable and salutary deterrent to air attack on this hemisphere” will be the 45,000 products of his program whom he hopes to turn out next year.