HAZARDOUS as are their own jobs pursuit and bombing pilots shake their heads when they watch a flight of attack planes skim over the ground at three or four miles a minute. Hugging the ground so closely that they sometimes have to zoom upward for room to bank their wings in a turn, attack pilots play a game of hide-and-seek with the enemy. They strike without warning and are gone in a flash. They fly around hills instead of over them to avoid being seen, and when possible they fly upwind to keep the sound of their motors from giving away their approach. Their object is to harass the enemy and keep it in a state of alarm, to destroy airplanes on the ground, and to raid anti-aircraft defenses as a preliminary to heavy bombing attacks. Four machine guns, two in each wing, lay a sweeping barrage on the ground in front of a Douglas A-17A attack plane when the pilot presses the master trigger. Fragmentation and small demolition bombs in the racks can be dropped singly or in groups. In the rear cockpit a gunner watches aft against pursuit planes that may sweep down on the plane. At March Field, Calif., a squadron commander of the 17th Attack Group outlines a typical mission to his pilots. “We assume that an enemy airdrome has been established on dry Red Lake in north-western Arizona. Orders are to destroy it at dawn tomorrow. The three flights will attack at one-minute intervals, each from a different direction. Objectives are airplanes and personnel on the ground, hangars, and to make the landing surface unusable. There will be radio silence | after taking off.” Then, from photographs rushed to him from observation planes the commander traces the path that the squadron will follow, deciding on the “initial point” where the three flights will split up for their attacks, and arranging a time schedule so that each element will attack immediately on the heels of the last. Leaving their home field, the planes take off in groups of three with only a few seconds between each group. This gets more airplanes up into the air faster than would be pos- sible with single take-offs. The surprise and whirlwind fury of their arrival are the attack planes’ best defense. They are on their target almost before the defenders can decide from what direction the sudden roar of motors is coming, and they are over the hills and out of sight again only a few seconds later. About the only defense against them is a ring of machine guns with the gunners steadily on the alert, under a constant tension that makes for poor marksmanship. The attack planes are hard to see from above and they fly so low that observers only a mile or so away may fail to spot them. The pilots are trained like Indians to take advantage of every dip and fold in the terrain. They fly more by check points than by compass, even on flights several hundred miles long, and every inch of their exact route has to be worked out meticulously ahead of time, Their idea is to fly straight to the target and across it with no time wasted in maneuvering for position. In bad weather they fly “contact” under the clouds and close in, wing tip to wing tip, to follow their leader when visibility is reduced. Neutralizing anti-aircraft defense would be their most dangerous work in actual warfare because on such a mission they purposely offer themselves as targets in order to locate the defenses and try to destroy them. On a night raid they go out ahead of the bombers to tempt the defenders to turn on the searchlight beams. Then their task is to put the searchlights out of commission with machine-gun fire. On daytime raids their job is to lay smoke screens through which the defenders can’t aim their guns and to make such a noise with their motors that the mechanical ears on the ground can’t pick up the fainter hum of the high-altitude bombers. One of the unusual hazards of the attack service is that if a pilot is careless he can be blown up by one of the bombs he has just dropped. Depending on the size of the missiles they drop, the pilots fly at altitudes of from 100 to several hundred feet when releasing bombs, giving them time to get far enough away to feel nothing but a sharp jar and lift to+the phresaasseach bomb explodes. The latest idea to use parachutes to lower bombs from minimum altitudes. A small parachute automatically opens when a bomb is released from its rack and serves to drop the bomb at a slower than normal speed. This permits more accurate target work and gives the plane a chance to escape even when it is flying only fifty feet above the ground.In the air a pilot is too busy to give a second thought to his hazards. Over his own territory he flies at a safe distance from the ground but by the time he is in “enemy” country he has descended to just above the tree tops. The ground at each tide and below the plane is nothing but a blur and the pilot keeps his attention directed forward. Besides flying his own plane he has to keep his place in the formation and watch the leading plane for signals. During the day the leader signals by wagging his wings or tail, and after dark by flashing groups of small blue signal lights on his fuselage and stabilizers. Attack pilots get special training in efficiency and safety and only those who react rapidly and have a special aptitude for the kind of flying they do are selected for the advanced training that is necessary. The flight training program is slow and positive, gradually bringing the pilot down to minimum altitudes after he has demonstrated his ability at higher levels, Once judged competent, pilots are trained continuously in attack work so that they won’t lose the knack of safe flight close to the ground. Just as exacting is the training that the enlisted gunner receives, The sensation of facing aft in the rear cockpit while maneuvering close to the ground is sometimes similar to the reaction you would get by riding backward on a roller coaster. If he faces forward the gunner can operate a second set of controls to fly the plane if the pilot is disabled, and he is connected with the forward cockpit by means of an interphone and a signal-light system. It is difficult to judge distances in aiming at an airplane diving toward his plane from the sky, and part of the gunner’s training is practice with a photo-gun that reveals his degree of marksmanship. Night missions are the most difficult. Squadron leaders are expected to lead their planes direct to the objective even though check points by which they navigate are lost in the night haze. In fog or clouds the formations bunch up until the navigation lights of the wing pilots shine in the cockpit of the leading plane. Over enemy country and racing downward toward the objective the formations tighten up again to prevent the noise of the motors from spreading over too wide a range and to minimize the chances of being heard by the anti-aircraft listening network. Every pilot switches off his navigation lights and keeps track of the other planes by their shadowy outlines and from what exhaust glow he can see. The powerful motors of the attack planes are designed especially for low-level operation, just the opposite of the super-charged engines that carry other airplanes to tremendous altitudes. Efficient as present planes and motors are, larger and faster attack planes are to be put in service by the Army Air Corps to make the work of the attack groups even more effective.