<text id=00he0509><title>Incremental Training Improvement</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>Incremental Training Improvement</hdr><body>
<p>The flying training program had been turning out about 300 pilots each year, a leisurely gait that kept pace with the small deliveries of aircraft in the pre-1939 period. The first major incremental improvement was planned in 1939; the 24-group program would require about 1,200 pilots per year, it was estimated. In June 1940, when the group goal was raised to 41, the training plans suggested that 7,000 pilots per year would suffice. In July 1940, that figure was raised to 12,000. And by February 1941, all pretense at restraint had been dropped, and the Air Corps was talking in terms of 30,000 pilots per year, a hundred-fold increase over its plans of two years earlier.
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<p>Planes also require mechanics. In 1939, the Air Corps was graduating about 1,500 per year from its technical training schools. By March 1941, that figure was scheduled to be 110,000, another increase of staggering proportions.
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<p>Facilities were hardly adequate. The prewar Corps lived and operated from 17 air bases and four depots, many of them dating from World War I or earlier, and most of them showing signs of their age. There had been no major improvement programs, and the bases suffered from poor maintenance because of budget restrictions. Happily, buildings, runways and barracks can be built more rapidly then complex aircraft. By the end of 1941, those 17 bases had grown to 114 major installations inside the continental United States; 14 more were to be built under pending legislation, and 14 were to be rehabilitated.
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<p>This is not to suggest that the coming hordes of airmen would live well everywhere during their training in the United States. Some did, but most didn't. The bases that were developed on a hurry-up basis during the early years of the expansion left much to be desired. A tarpaper-covered airmen's barracks in the deep south's summertime has to be experienced to be believed.
