Teaching fledglings how to fly was hard work and not very much fun. They both would have preferred other duty. But-for dify ferent personal reasons-both were aware that instructor pilot dut was better for them than an assignment to a fighter squadron or to an attack torpedo squadron aboard a carrier or to observation plane S catapulted from a battleship would have been.
Ed Bitter believed that duty as an IP meant several things. First, that the Navy recognized he was a better pilot than most pilots. Second, that demonstrating the leadership characteristics IPS had to have to be successful would enhance his career (a tour as an IP was considered a prerequisite to command of a squadron). He also believed that the primary duty of a commanding officer was not so much to command, to issue orders, but to teach.
The main things that instructors did was fly. Aviators assigned to regular squadrons were lucky if they got forty hours in the air in a month. That was two hours a day, five days a week. Instructor pilots often flew three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. In a two-year tour as an IP, Dick Canidy expected to acquire very likely more than three times the hours he would have had he been sent to an operational squadron. Aeronautical engineers with a lot of flight time were paid more money than those who had less, or who couldn’t fly at all.
X The world looked a lot different today than it had in 1938 when he’d graduated from MIT. The only worry he had had then was putting in his four years’ service. The world had been at peace then, but now that world had changed. France had fallen. Japan was fighting China. Young men his age were flying Spitfires against Messerschmitts over England. Still he refused to think about what he would do if, in June 1942, the Navy would not discharge him.
Advanced flight training was conducted in North American SNJ-2 Texans, singlewing, all-metal, closed-cockpit six-hundredhorsepower retractable-landing-gear aircraft that cruised at about two hundred knots. Primary training was conducted using opencockpit, fixed-landing-gear Steannan Kaydet biplanes. They weren’t really Steannans, Boeing having some time before taken over that company, and while they were splendid basic training aircraft, stressed for acrobatics and sturdy enough to survive the inevitable hard landings, they were not really suitable for crosscountry flight. The planes they would fly today, officially N2Ss, had Continental Re70 engines producing a little over two hundred horsepower and a cruising speed of just over one hundred miles per hour.
When he had been a student pilot, Ed Bitter had thought (as had just about every other student pilot passing through Pensacola) that it would have made a lot more sense to wait until the students were advanced and let them make their cross-country flights in the faster Texans. It was only after he had gone through the rest of the flight training program-including carrier qualification-and been made an instructor that he understood the Navy’s reasoning.
A six- or seven-hundred-mile dead-reckoning flight, in an opencockpit airplane making a hundred knots, while checking his position by looking for landmarks on the deck, was an experience the student pilot never forgot. It took him back to Eddie Rickenbacker and the Lafayette Escadrille, whose planes came with no more sophisticated navigation equipment and about the same performance as the Steannan. It was something they might need to remember when they were flying fighters capable of more than three hundred knots off the decks of aircraft carriers.
Bitter and Canidy each watched their students perform the preflight check, and then watched them climb into the forward cockpits. They took a last look themselves, and then climbed into the aft cockpits and put on leather helmets. The plane captains and the ground handlers pulled the props through a rotation, the engines were started, and the chocks were pulled.
Ed Bitter’s ensign turned around and looked at him. Bitter nodded and pulled his goggles down over his eyes.
“Pensacola Tower, Navy One-oh-one,” Bitter’s student called over his radio.
“One-oh-one, Pensacola.”
“Pensacola, Navy One-oh-one, a flight of two N2S aircraft, destination Valdosta, Georgia, requests taxi and takeoff.”