The Lighter Side of Training
Col. Louis D. Van Mullem, USAF (Ret.)
In 1942, I was a major at Randolph Field in Texas, the training base for Basic pilot training. In my squadron I had under my command about forty-five flying cadets (cadets were often called “Mister”) and twenty instructors, mostly lieutenants. The airplanes we used were Basic Trainers, BT-9s and BT-14s that looked very much like the AT-6, but had less powerful engines and a fixed landing gear. The real difference between the two was that the BT-9 was powered by a Wright R-975 radial engine and the BT-14 was powered by a Pratt and Whitney R-985. Cadets arrived with about seventy-five hours of flying time and they were ready to step into bigger, more advanced airplanes. The flight training at Randolph Field consisted of landings and takeoffs, chandelles and lazy-eights, and other aerobatic maneuvers. Cadets also started on instrument flying and day and night cross country flight training. Some amusing incidents took place while I was an instructor and these are two of my most memorable stories from that assignment.
Barefoot in the Hangar
W
e always used to send our cadets to Austin for their night flights because it was the only city where all the street lights were blue. You could recognize it easily and from a long distance away. That’s where Cadet Sam Baker should have been going when he went missing one particular dark night. The morning after we sent him out on his solo night flying training mission, I got a phone call early in the morning. It was Cadet Baker saying he had landed over one hundred miles south of Austin in a small airfield near Goliad, Texas. I decided to fly over to this airfield and have him fly on my wing back to Randolph Field. The airfield in Goliad was a small grass landing strip but with no real runway, and it had one small hangar. I landed and taxied up near the hangar and out came Mr. Baker with a big smile. He met me at my airplane after I disembarked and I noticed something peculiar: he was missing shoes and I noticed his toes were
sticking out of well-worn socks! He saluted me smartly, and I asked, “Mr. Baker, where are your shoes?” “Back in the hangar, Sir.” I obviously thought he meant the small hangar on the field. So I told him “Well go get them and put them on.” “No sir, they’re back in our hangar at Randolph.” It seems that his primary instructor told him that he would get a better feel for the airplane if he flew barefoot. This proved that cadets would try anything if they thought it would improve their flying. Then I asked him how he found and safely landed on this small air field. He said “You taught us that if we ever got lost we should follow railroad tracks until we came to a train station.” Every train station had a large sign at each end of the building with the name of the town on it. Cadet Baker had found and followed the railroad tracks and was trying to find the name of the town on the station with his landing lights, buzzing over it many times. The lights and
THE LIGHTER SIDE
the airplane engine noise woke up practically everybody in the town. It was nearly midnight, and they figured that he was in trouble, so the townspeople drove their cars to the airfield and lined them up with their headlights on so he could make out the landing strip. Fortunately, he made a good landing and did not damage the airplane. On the way back, he was so low on fuel that we had to fly from Goliad to Corpus Christi Naval Air Station to refuel. When we landed, I ordered Mr. Baker to stay in the airplane while it was being refueled. This wasn’t standard procedure, but there was no way that I wanted an Air Corps cadet wandering around a Navy Base in holey socks. We would never hear the end of it if the Navy had discovered Mr. Baker was missing shoes. (R) Instructor pilot Van Mullem with a student, circa 1942.
Van Mullem
The Lucky Flying Cadet Manfredi
O
ne of the patterns the cadets flew during their cross-country navigation training flights was from Randolph Field to Kerrville, to Austin, and back to Randolph. Cadet Manfredi took off from Randolph after dark to fly this pattern. He headed west at three thousand feet for Kerrville on a dark, moonless night. And, as cadets sometimes did, he missed a checkpoint and got lost. The only flying instruments in those days were a compass, an altimeter, and RPM indicator (tachometer), an artificial horizon, and a radio. You had to know the compass heading to your destination and the approximate flight time it took to fly there. If you got lost, especially at night, there was no way to know where you were unless you recognized a landmark or found a train station with the name of the town on it. There must have been some “cockpit confusion” and Mr. Manfredi kept flying west of San Antonio, into the hill country. After flying around for a couple of hours, completely lost and getting low on fuel, Cadet Manfredi spotted a car going down a road into what looked like a very small village that turned out to be Sonora, Texas. He turned on his landing lights, found the two lane country road, and miraculously landed safely at about 11:30 at night. The airplane rolled to a stop right in front of a small motel. The motel manager was really surprised to see an airplane just outside his cottage’s door step. Soon the local sheriff arrived, and with a little help from some of the folks nearby, they managed to push the airplane off the road and rolled it in between two cottages, with the tail under a carport. The motel manager put up Mr. Manfredi in one of the vacant cottages for the night. The next morning I received a call from Mr. Manfredi saying that he had landed on a road and was staying in a Sonora motel. Naturally, I was very glad to hear that he was safe and that the airplane was undamaged.
I told him I would fly out to Sonora with my assistant flight commander, Ralph Saltsman, and he would fly the airplane back to Randolph with Manfredi in the back. When we arrived over Sonora, we couldn’t locate the airplane since the tail was under a carport. We found Cadet Manfredi by contacting him on his plane’s radio, but we still had to find a place to land, and landing on the two lane road looked entirely too dangerous. I found a football field nearby, surrounded by a wooden fence, and landed there. Ralph and I made it over to the cadet’s plane and pushed it out onto the road. Ralph took the stick and with Mr. Manfredi in the back seat, they took off for Randolph Field. I went back to my plane, a BT-14, and took off from the football field - but my prop and wheels hit the fence, throwing lumber all over. Somehow the plane didn’t nose dive or stall and I got home safely. Flying Cadet Manfredi wasn’t the only one that was lucky in Sonora. [Author Louis Van Mullem graduated from the University of Illinois ROTC program in 1938 and immediately entered the Army Coast Artillery Anti-aircraft Unit at Fort Sheridan as a 2nd lieutenant. In 1939 he enlisted as a flying cadet in the US Army Air Corp, graduating from Flying Class 40-C. After graduation he was sent to Randolph Air Field to become a flying instructor. That started a four year assignment in the training command at Randolph Field. His military career included serving in India and China, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. He proudly served with the 27th Fighter Wing from 1948 until 1955. In 1969 after nearly 32 years of service, he retired to Santa Barbara, California, where he enjoys time with his family, swimming and playing golf.] (Ed Note: The photograph heading this article is of the WWII training diorama in the Early Years Galley that features the same type of basic trainer as the one in Col. Van Mullem’s stories.)