NIGHT fighting against fleets of bombers is a recent development of aerial warfare, so today Uncle Sam's student pilots are getting a thorough coaching in night maneuvers. During a busy night at Mather Field, Sacramento, as well as at other advanced training bases, 16 students at a time go up for familiarization flights. From the ground you can possibly avoid collisions. In all directions and on different orbits red and green navigation lights are racing against the stars. Not much more than half a minute apart planes swoop down for landings, taxi back to the end of the runway, and roar off again into the dark. It seems impossible for the students to keep their heads in all this confusion. Then the control officer tells you that the planes are all on courses that keep them safely separated. The air over the field is divided into four quadrants. Four students are assigned to fly in each quadrant at altitudes 1,000 feet apart. The flyers are called in one at a time for landings by radio from the control tower or from the control plane parked near the end of the runway. Sometimes they land by the light of the field floodlights; other times the field is kept dark and the students use their wing lights. To simulate the radio silence of an actual war operation the control officer sometimes snaps off his radio transmitter and signals the planes with a light gun that throws a beam strong enough to attract a pilot’s attention five or six miles away. The students receive balanced diets selected to improve their night vision. Two years ago the Army was training a few hundred students a year. This program has been stepped up to 30,000 students a year with provision for still fur- ther expansion. Prospective students who have not studied two years at college may qualify by passing an examination instead. Scores of new training centers are springing up, particularly in the south, where the weather permits all-year training. Night flying is one activity that is emphasized today. Precision formation flying is another. Formation flying is safer than it used to be in spite of much higher speeds because the speed range and acceleration of the new and larger motors allows more positive control. The rear planes of a formation used to fly at slightly higher altitudes than the leaders as a safety factor; now all the pilots in a formation maintain the same level because in the new planes downward vision is restricted. Formations are looser now and the pilots keep five yards or more between wing tips instead of flying so close that the wing tips almost touch. This is done purposely as a training measure because the greater distances are harder to judge and hence the pilots learn more exact control. The modern trainers are as fast as the best combat planes of four or five years ago and the students take off and land in formation at speeds that were considered dangerous not many years in the past. Improved landing gear and improved control features make this possible. If you should be accepted by the Air Forces for training, your first five weeks would be spent in a replacement center where you will be taught infantry drill, military law and courtesy, and will begin your studies to become a flying officer. From there you go to a primary training school, operated by civilians under Air Forces supervision, for ten weeks of ground school and flight training. Sometime during the first two or three weeks of this period you will solo and then you will begin clementary maneuvers and acrobatics. Ten more weeks are spent at basic school, at a different field, where ground classes are continued and where you must solo all over again in a faster, heavier airplane. By now you are making night flights and getting the feel of more intricate acrobatics. You participate in cross country hops and learn more about radio, gunnery, navigation, and meteorology. Graduates from this stage of instruction go on to advanced school where once again they first fly with an instructor and finally solo in faster and more advanced aircraft that are equipped with retractable wheels, flaps, and a supercharged engine. By now the students have become capable pilots and they spend their time in acquiring the precise touch needed for formation work and the maneuvers of aerial warfare. The training is fast and thorough and the students are on their toes all the time. Honest mistakes are overlooked but mistakes caused by carelessness are handled by the student’s fellow pilots. If a student on a cross country flight gets mixed up in his navigation and lands at the wrong field, he won’t forget it in a hurry. At some fields such a mistake brings the student the uncoveted honor of passession of a humorous trophy that he has to keep until another student “wins” it away with another mistake. Taxiing into a hangar wall, landing on one wheel, and similar careless actions earn him a huge tin medal or membership in the local chapter of the “Stupid Pilots’ Club.” The four stages of training are comparable to the four years of education in a university. About 30 percent of the students fail to graduate, most of these being weeded out in the preparatory period at the replacement centers. Instruction is exactly the same at all schools of the same grade with the result that students from different parts of the country who are brought together are able to team up and fly in formation just as if they had been practicing| as a group for weeks. Graduates of the training course are commissioned as second lieutenants in the Army Air Forces reserve and go on from there to active duty, being assigned to one of such specialized branches of the air force as pursuit or bombardment. There are other jobs in the air force beside the one of handling an airplane’s controls. Specially trained navigators are needed for long flights on large aircraft. Navigation is a specialized training available to university students who have, studied mathematics. The 15-week navigation course at such schools as Mather Field leads to a commission. In school they specialize in piloting, radio aids, celestial navigation, and dead reckoning. Learning to fly an airplane is no part of the course although many navigation students have already learned to fly. During the course they spend 100 hours in a Beechcraft “flying classroom,” before and after dark, learning to work out practical problems in navigation. Sometimes a pilot takes up a group of students and purposely gets “lost.” Then it is up to the students to find out exactly where they are and work out the course for returning to their base. As one practice stunt, navigation students from three widely separated fields recently took off after dark and by keeping track of each other’s position by radio were able to rendezvous at 10,000 feet over strange country and then fly in formation to a fourth field. Basically, aerial navigation is the same as marine navigation but a marine officer can take his time in working out his position, while even a 10-minute delay in the air may be serious. The men in a plane must know where they are at the present instant instead of where they were 50 or 75 miles back. Automatic computers and overgrown slide rules have been developed so that navigators can find a position with a few simple computations instead of work- ing out long problems. Thirty thousand new pilots a year could fly a tremendous fleet of airplanes and even this great training program may be increased in the near future. Fortunately America has no dearth of young men who will make capable pilots. One authority estimates that there are half a million American youths who have the qualifications for becoming excellent pilots.