Crashes

The single-seater plane was flying much too low for acrobatics. The Army pilot, overconfident, rolled it out of one tight vertical turn into another in the opposite direction. As the ship lost flying speed it rebelled, shuddered, whipped over and down in a sickening corkscrew. The pilot never had a chance to recover control.

Again & again & again this kind of thing occurred-all over the U.S. this week, last week, the week before. As the wartime Army Air Forces expanded, the number of accidents increased by leaps & bounds. Some increase had been expected. Ten thousand pilots will have more crashes than one thousand. But the disturbing fact was that the accident rate was rising.

Aerial Thumbs. Army peacetime flying had been a model of sanity and caution. In the decade ending last spring the accident rate had been steadily shaved, but it had been inching up ever since the training-expansion program began. Only a few of the accidents were fatal. Seventy per cent were minor, mostly on training fields-pilots and student pilots telescoped their landing gears in hard touchdowns or chewed up wingtips in groundloops.

The most obvious answer was that embryo airmen are all thumbs, that inexperience takes toll. But it was not that simple. Graduates of advanced training schools had their troubles too.

FSO's Harris. The AAF asked its Flying Safety Organization to see what it could do. FSO found that the reasons for air mishaps were mostly human reasons; only 14% were due to mechanical or structural defects in the planes.

The basic problem was to teach a man the tricks of playing safe when he moved in three dimensions, so that he knew where he was in relation to the earth during each split-second of a maneuver. Flyers often get too cocky in acrobatics, wheel their mounts around at too low an altitude to recover safely if something goes wrong.

The greying locks of 39-year-old Colonel Samuel R. Harris, FSO director, were growing greyer over the problem: how to better the safety record without destroying the zip, cocksureness and daredevilish-ness of airmen bound for the battlefronts.

Grapevine Discipline. The Army is launching a new safety campaign with posters. Some of the posters point out the differences in the characteristics of different planes. "A P39 [Airacobra fighter] will climb like a homesick angel," reads one. "A bt-13 [Vultee trainer] won't." , Officially unmentioned but part & parcel of the safety campaign is a grapevine disciplinary system. The accident-preventers launch a word-of-mouth report that Pilot Joe Doe pulled a pretty dumb one when he groundlooped that P-4O. Presently the gossip reaches Pilot Joe Doe, who feels terrible.

Also helpful in accident prevention are the new elaborate "screening" tests given candidates at induction and preflight centers. A series of 21 physical, mental and mechanical examinations weed out a high percentage of men who would be apt to crash.

FSO hopes to reduce the accident rate some 20 to 25% in the next year. But FSO's Colonel Harris puts his finger on the problem: "Take a kid full of vinegar and new flying skill, put a parachute on him and strap a shiny, powerful airplane on to him, and you have one of the finest combinations for trouble in the world."

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