This airplane also had a radio, two speed propellor and flaps. We also had hard surfaced runways and a control tower. The jump from Primary, the PT-19 off of grass and none of the above was one big jump for me! I let the airplane scare me a little and conseqently took longer to solo in this airplane than any others in flight training. It took me little over 4 hours of dual training to solo in this one. All of the instructors here were military officers and went from 2nd. Lieutenant up. We actually had two instructors here, one for visual and one for instrument flying.
None of the instructors that I had from Primary - John Robertson - on through Advanced were nearly as good as he.
I could do aerobatics better than my instructor. My instrument instructor was named Sauer and he was just that! I could not even taxi the plane level according to him. I will admit that my instrument flying was rough particularly at the beginning. One of the things that I remember was that he would put me in what was called "unusual attitudes" which meant that the plane was near a stall, tight turn while diving or climbing etc. The one particular time he had almost stalled the plane which meant to recover, speed would need to be built up so a dive of sorts or getting the nose lowered toward the ground was necessary. I over did it and we began a series of small dives and climbs. Sauer yelled into the intercom, "Are we having a black out contest here Mr.?"

My test pilot make up began coming out here. One of the instructors got on stage at a briefing and stated, "Recover from a spin in three turns for if you do not, the plane will not recover." I simply did not believe him. I got a visual flight shortly there after. I took the plane to 19,000 feet which is very high for that plane. I had determined to put the plane into a spin, let it go around more than three turns and then see what happened. I loved to do spins any way! I put the plane into the spin and went around twenty three turns! I did everything that I could to make the spin tighten up in its revolutions to no avail. It stayed the same. When I had counted the twenty three turns, I tried to recover and the plane recovered just the same as it did from three turns. I told my friends, Lee Helm and Harvey Hamilton about it. They both thought I was crazy for trying it. I now had more confidence in the plane than I ever had before so it was a good thing that I had done.

One of my classmates was killed before we had any instrument training. His name was Hinton so due to the alphabetical arrangements his bunk was next to mine. He apparently saw the lights of cars on a road, thought they were stars, put the nose down and plowed into the road at high speed. He was married to a nice woman so I felt very sorry for her as well as him!

About half way through this training we were all lined up in a formation. This was to select where we would go for advanced training. We would go to either single engine or multi - engine advanced training when we finished here. Single engine advanced meant fighter planes later. Multi - engine meant bombers. I was disappointed for I wanted fighters but was the second one picked for multi - engine because of my height.

Due to the selection for multi - engine training, I just moved across the road for Advanced training.

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