In 1941 my father was an Army Air Corps grunt who was enlisted for flight training in the event a war were to occur (it was still several months prior to December 7, but as he used to tell me ‘the war was in the air’). There were three training airplanes prospective pilots had to train in, each progressively more difficult to master than the last. Pilot trainees were washed out along the way, being assigned other on board chores or, at the very least, desk work. The first of these trainer planes was the Fairchild PT-19, often referred to as ‘the cradle of heroes’. It’s a beautiful bi-plane, with tandem seating allowing the instructor to sit in the front and give hand signals to the student pilot–radios were not yet used in what was considered ‘simple’ aircraft. Assuming you did well in the Fairchild, you moved onto the Vultee ‘Vibrator’, so named because the very powerful Pratt/Whitney engine was too much for the simple, lightweight airframe to comfortably support, thus giving pilots the difficult task of controlling a much less forgiving plane than the Fairchild. If you made it past the Vultee you went to the final stage and were assigned training in the T-6 Texan, still considered one of the most difficult planes ever made to master. My father mastered it. He was made a pilot and flew C-47s throughout the war–basically a transport plane which also dropped paratroopers. Above is a lovely, short (ten minute) look at the Fairchild. The narrative presented gives us an idea of what a strangely emotional and quite scary experience the training must have been to adolescent boys from around the country who never dreamed of flying a plane, much less of entering a war that was clearly on the way.