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Show I America In Action FROM QUIET CLASSES TO I ROARING BATTLEFRONTS FT. WORTH, TEXAS. Sending and receiving 18 words per minute on radio equipment that's anchored to a laboratory bench in a quiet school room is one thing. Maintaining Maintain-ing that required speed in the radio compartment of a bucking, plunging Liberator or Flying Fortress, filled with the cacophony of air combat and the roar of four 1,250-horse-power motors, is quite a different matter. That's why the army air forces training command has added a new phase of instruction to the curriculum curricu-lum for bombardment radio operators opera-tors trained in its two largest radio schools at Sioux Falls, S. D., and Scott Field, 111. It's a phase designed de-signed to bridge the gap between the individual training of radio operators opera-tors in the technical schools of the Training Command, and the "team" training in B-17s, B-24s, B-25s, and B-26s provided by the operational training units as a post-graduate, pre-combat course. " To do this the training command has filled the air above the vast, somnolent South Dakota plains and the "Looking Glass" prairie in Western West-ern Illinois, with' droves of small, slow flying, light aircraft. In these 65-horsepower cabin monoplanes mon-oplanes the student radio operators "hit the blue" for the first time in their air force careers at the start of the last two weeks of their training. train-ing. The student sits behind the pilot in the two-cabin planes. With headphones head-phones on and a telegrapher's key at his fingertips he works with a small, compact, low-voltage, two-way two-way radio with a 25-mile range. The planes fly in echelons of five. The student applies all that he has learned in weeks of intense study and laboratory practice. He communicates com-municates with other ships in his echelon, with the control tower operator op-erator at the air field, with one or more ground stations, including radios ra-dios in grounded bombers which have been camouflaged and dispersed dis-persed throughout the "combat training train-ing area." The five airplanes in an echelon, plus the ground stations, form a "radio "ra-dio net" in which all stations operate op-erate on the same wave length. The students take their turns on the ground and in the air. The "combat "com-bat training area" is a life-sized model of an advanced air base in which students live under battle conditions con-ditions during the last days of their schooling. The light airplanes perform a yeoman service. Ferried in "brand new," often by woman pilots, they are put into service immediately and maintained in perfect condition. Enlisted pilots, many of whom have had combat experience, are used for the training flights. The planes are sturdy and easy to handle. han-dle. They make it possible to give a radio student flying experience without tying up aircraft needed for vital air crew training and combat. As one training command officer expressed it "With this system, instead in-stead of making their mistakes with combat crews they make them here where nothing is hurt but a man's pride." Released by Western Newspaper Union. |