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Show I ' America In Ae&ion FROM QUIET CLASSES TO 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 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. 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. |