Pilots, Pilots

On a bend on Florida's wide, meandering, moss-fringed St. Johns River, where once only loglike alligators drowsed, a big bird alighted last week. It carried the Navy's crinkle-eyed Air Chief Jack Tow ers. Startled alligators gave the spot a wide berth. Less than a twelvemonth before, the bend had been a National Guard camp in typical northern Florida terrain --flat, sandy, scraggly with pine. Last week, six months ahead of schedule, it was a $15,000,000 naval air base, combed, brushed and parted with runways, hang ars, shops and barracks. The airborne Navy visitors looked on the Navy's handi work and found it good. There were a few speeches, the flag was run up, the watch set, the guard posted. An hour later it was another working day for the Navy's southeastern air station.

Navy airhawks were pleased with their new station, not only because it is within easy range of the U. S.'s maritime frontier, the Caribbean, but because it gives the Navy another training field for pilots. Rushed to completion to take some of the pressure off the big training base at Pensacola, Fla., Jacksonville will double the Navy's output of aviators. The Navy to day has only a few more than 3,000 pilots, a training capacity (at Pensacola) of 150 a month. Its goal of planes is 15,000, which will require 18,000 pilots. The Jacksonville base, at first, will turn out only 50 a month. But by next July Jack Towers hopes to enroll 200 students a month in each of the two schools, as signing 3,000 graduates a year to tactical organizations. Still abuilding is a third school, at Corpus Christi, Tex., to be commissioned early in 1942, with an initial capacity of 100 students a month.

The U. S. Army Air Corps has an even bigger quota to fill: 25,000 planes by 1942, for which it wants 36,000 pilots.

Last year the Air Corps began distributing its training to 18 civilian flying schools for primary flying, took its apprentice fliers on from there to Randolph Field (San Antonio, Tex.) and finished them off at Kelly Field, on the other side of town. Few months ago the Air Corps started another new flying school at Maxwell Field (Montgomery, Ala.). Last week it opened another at Moffett Field (Sunnyvale, Calif.).

With its pilot output still around 475 a month, Air Corps Chief "Hap" Arnold announced last week that the Army's training quota for next year would be doubled: 24,900 cadets and officers would be started through the school. How many would be graduated at year's end no Air Corps man could say. Safe bet was around 15,000. Safer bet still was that both Army and Navy were out to beat airplane-production schedules; that when planes came off the lines there would be no lack of pilots to fly them.

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