STUNTING NOT NECESSARY

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVI, Issue 14571, 15 January 1948, Page 4

STUNTING NOT NECESSARY

MAKING AN AIR PILOT Discouraging Civil Aviation New Methods Tried In America Is it necessary to learn how to fly an aeroplane through all those aerial gymnastics —tailspins and stalls or nose dives, figure eights, and simulated forced landings, and similar manoeuvres —in order to become a pilot of your own plane? ‘‘Decidedly not,” says C. E. A. Brown, Ohio’s Director of Aviation. “In fact, those manoeuvres are just a waste of valuable and expensive flying time.” And Mr Brown is out to prove his point—which is the reason for a cross-country-flight training experiment being conducted at Ohio University’s flying school at Athens. If the programme is successful, it may revolutionise the system of pilot training throughout the country--especially for businessmen who fly their own planes. For years, pilots seeking Federal pilots’ certificates have been forced to demonstrate their proficiency in getting into and out of tailspins, in performing various types of stalls, and in showing what they would do in case they had to make forced landings. Thousands of v/ould-be pilots—and would-be plane owners- —refused to take training or dropped out after they started to become pilots, merely because they feared the discomfort of the aerial acrobatics. “And that’s all wrong,” says Mr Brown. “Many of them were the type of people aviation really needs —the good conservative businessmen who need planes for inexpensive and comfortable transportation, and whom aviation needs because they can afford to buy aeroplanes. “The things that cadse the most highway traffic accidents are fast driving, wet pavements, passing on hills or curves —but po one seriously proposes that the way to determine whether a motorist is fit to drive is by requiring him to pass on dangerous hills and curves and show how he can get away with it. “Yet, that is what they do in

teaching men and women to fly aeroplanes.” At Athens, 300 students were chosen. Half are being taught by the new “cross-country method”; the other half by the old-fashioned methods. Then they will be given similar tests of proficiency. Under the new training methods, students are taken, right from the first, on cross-country flights to strange airports—usually a different one each lesson—where they must make landings. Some of the strange fields are merely small grass strips, others are big air terminals with radio and control towers and long hard-surfaced runways.