The actor Robert Taylor was an avid flyer starting in the 1930s. He often flew himself and his co-stars to location, terrifying the studio executives who saw their valuable ‘properties’ vulnerable to sudden wreckage and instant death. (Planes then didn’t have built-in parachutes to guide them to the ground in case of engine failure, as the Cirrus now does–making it the plane of choice for current celebrity flyers). The execs needn’t have worried. Taylor was a superb flyer and so it was no accident that when World War 2 came about, he found his niche in the Army Air Corp, the name for the future Army Air Force. There he produced and starred in training films for pilots and above I’ve posted parts one and two of a short film that covers how to fly the basic trainer that all young men who wanted to be pilots had to master. It was named the Boeing-Stearman Trainer but was simply referred to as ‘The Stearman’, usually with a look of fright and/or nausea at the thought of climbing into the damn thing and attempting to manage it. A pilot who currently restores old Stearmans once announced to a class full of people eager to fly one ‘remember, this thing was built in order to wash pilots out.’ Taylor’s stentorian delivery is well-suited to the grimly difficult task he has of explaining how this monstrous machine works and what young men who barely ever flew as a passenger had in store for them. Yet his firm and get-down-to-business manner is oddly inspiring; you sense that the pilots who passed the mustard were motivated to live up to the standards of the Hollywood star/ace pilot. I love the section on landing the beast. It has a tail-wheel which General Aviation planes and trainers no longer do, due to the clumsiness of attempting to land all three imbalanced wheels at once–Taylor calls it ‘the perfect three-point attitude’. As I said, old Stearmans still exist and restored ones sell for several hundred thousands of dollars to serious air geeks. Even well-trained pilots find them unusually terrifying to operate. It makes one appreciate how much ‘stuff’ the young men of the 1930s and 1940s had when put up to the task of learning a new and impossibly difficult craft designed to defend their country. It’s a portrait of a very different time, in a very different America than the one we now know.