AIR: Here Come the Pilots

Stocky, quick-gaited Major General Barton K. Yount, flying up & down the country last week on his whirlwind inspections of Army air schools, had little time to reflect that he had become president of the biggest university in the world. He was too busy examining, asking questions, criticizing, improving, and racing on.

General Yount’s Flying Training Command now had scores upon scores of war-emergency fields, hacked quickly out of the U.S. earth from Florida to California. It had men by scores upon scores of thousands, learning how to fly, navigate, shoot, bomb. And FTC was still growing—for if air power can win the war, then General Yount’s schools are the cradle of victory.

In his few spare moments, General Yount liked to refer to his command as “astronomical.” The objective was stepped up from 12,000 to 30,000 pilots a year before Pearl Harbor, jumped to 50,000 afterward. Now it is far higher, eventually will probably exceed 100,000 pilots a year—plus bombardiers, navigators and gunners.

Two Years from the Front. Always General Yount worked under the oppression of time. He could enlarge his university here, cut off a day or two there, but he could only work within limits. To train a man to fly a combat airplane takes six months; to make him a competent battlefront pilot, two years. The incubation process is as inflexible as the human gestation period.

General Yount’s fledgling pilots had to learn that a cumulonimbus cloud should be regarded as a red traffic light of the air lanes, because it means rough air thunder storms, sometimes hail. But even after they memorized cloud forms until they could recite them in their sleep, they could not learn a proper respect for weather until they stuck their noses into trouble. That took time.

They had to learn to rely, under bad instrument-flying conditions, on the primary aids of their dim-lit cockpit panel: the indicators for turn, bank and rate of climb, and the air-speed dial. But until they got into conditions so bad that the birds themselves walked, they could not learn to use those aids properly. That took time, too.

They had to learn the tremendous, all-important value of flying judgment—from the moment of take-off until they touched down once again on the airport. They had to learn to respect the tail gunner of an enemy bomber. But until cockiness got the better of them, and they scraped close to death, they could not learn to leaven courage with caution. And that took time.

Neophyte to Airman. But the process took more than time: it took fields, equipment and instructors in a measure far beyond the wildest dreams of a few years ago. (For months the instructor problem alone was so critical that graduates had to be plowed back into the system to teach newcomers.) It took a great reserve of the best manpower: even after the most meticulous selection, 35 to 40% of students washed out annually before Pearl Harbor (no figures have been released since then).

Indefatigable General Yount strives patiently to narrow the time spread between the arrival of the neophyte and the emergence of the airman. He is just short of ubiquitous in his scattered university. In one eight-day period recently he zipped in and out of 16 schools for inspection.

At Midland, Tex. he watched a youngster who had trudged in only a week before go 4,000 feet aloft in a twin-engine bombardier-trainer plane, drop a stick of bombs smack in the center of a 100-ft. circle. He saw San Antonio’s student navigators, riding on motor-drawn platforms above a classroom map, work out problems they would face in the air. At Harlingen, Tex. he watched blindfolded enlisted men take machine guns apart and put them together again by touch, as they must in the gloom of a tail turret on a night-bombing mission.

Slow Burner. For 58-year-old Barton Kyle Yount appointment to command of flight-training activities was logical. Since his graduation from West Point in 1907, he has advanced steadily as a military educator.

In World War I, he commanded the School of Military Aeronautics at Austin, Tex., and later the Randolph Field Air Corps Training Center. A tour as assistant chief of the Air Corps and chief of the training and operations division in 1939-40 prepared him for his present post.

Associates know him as a calm man, a steady, levelheaded “slow burner.” He speaks without wasting words, often with a dry, schoolteacher’s sarcasm.

One of the few times the Army has seen him flustered was at a training field where he had arranged to meet his son, Bart Jr., a West Point undergraduate and now a student flyer. General Yount climbed from his command plane, walked down the customary line of post officers to shake hands. At the end, surprised, he asked: “Where’s Bart?”

“You just shook hands with him, General,” he was told.

“Damndest thing that could happen to a father,” he exploded. “That will teach me to look a man in the face when I shake his hand.”