Pensacola Tower gave them the time, the altimeter, and the barometer, then taxi clearance to the threshold of runway 28. When the student pilot reported them in position, the tower gave permission to take off at one-minute intervals.
They climbed to five thousand feet, and took up a course that was almost due east. Canidy’s student took up a position two hundred yards above Bitter’s Stearman. Canidy’s student would fly Bit- Paul tee’s student’s wing for half the trip, and then their positions would be reversed.
Two aircraft were sent on each cross-country flight, alternating as leader, so there would always be one aircraft checking on the other. Now that he had come to understand the reasoning behind the flight program, Ed Bitter had concluded that, like many other oddon-the-surface facets of Navy policy, there was sound reasoning behind it.
One part of the program was even an officially sanctioned “confuse your students” portion of the cross-country flight, designed to ensure that simply because they were about to be awarded the gold wings of a naval aviator, it would never enter their minds that they were anything but rank amateurs:
13. DISORIENTATION.
(a) Purpose: to give student pilots the experience of sufferin location disorientation, and the techniques of recovery therefrom.
(b) Method: At some point during the Montgomerymobile leg of Flight #48, while flying over the area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola 239, instructor pilots will, without previous warning to the student, take over the controls of the aircraft, and attempt to disorient the student pilot by such maneuvers as aerobatics, stalls, and lowaltitude flight.
The controls will then be returned to the student and he will be ordered to resume his original course and altitude.
(c) Evaluation: Instructor pilots will grade the student on his ability to reorient himself, taking into consideration the time and degree of assurance with which he is able to do so.
The area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola was a 25,000-acre property owned by the Carlson Publishing Company. It was in the pines, the management of Carlson Publishing Company being strongly convinced that it was just a matter of time before chemists came up with a means of using fastgrowing loblolly pine for newsprint. Carlson Publishing Company published eleven medium-sized newspapers throughout the South, and these consumed a good deal of paper, all of which had to be purchased from mills using New England and Canadian pulpwood.
While they were waiting for the chemists to find a solution to this expensive and galling problem, the property was used by the chairman of the board of the Carlson Publishing Company primarily as a hunting preserve in the fall, and a vacation site in the spring and summer.
The chairman of the board, on behalf of his company, had been more than happy to grant the U.S. Navy permission to conduct lowlevel aerial flights, to include landing privileges, on the area now marked on the map. He understood the necessity to train pilots as realistically as possible, he and the admiral and the others having been sent off to fight the Hun with less than twenty-five hours’ total time in the air. Brandon Chambers had never forgotten that literally nauseating feeling of terror. He saw giving the Navy permission to use the land as his patriotic duty. And if some young pilot did dump his plane in the forests, the Navy would pay for the damages.
Lieutenant Ed Bitter had heard the story about the admiral who had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille getting permission from another Escadrille pilot to use the land long before it was told to him while he was receiving training to become an instructor pilot. He had heard it from Brandon Chambers himself. Ed Bitter’s mother and Genevieve (Mrs. Brandon) Chambers were sisters.
So far as he knew, no one at NAS Pensacola knew of his per sonal connect ion with The Plantation.
Neither did anyone know that his father and his brother were respect ively chain nan of the board and preside nt of Bitter Commo dity Broker age, Inc., of Chicago.
Edwin Howell Bitter was an officer of the Regular Naval Establishment. It was neither seemly nor wise for a Regular naval officer to let it be known that he had an outside income from a trust fund that was approximately four times his Navy pay.