Yeah, heh heh. My later solos were less “interesting” too, fortunately.

 

As I climbed out of Navy Corpus in a T-28 I remember wondering how a Japanese pilot with my level of experience would feel facing a pair of Navy Hellcat pilots with 500 hours of combat time in 1944.

Talk about your "dead man walking".

 

I can not imagine the difficulty and fear of a young/low time american getting into a dog fight with a battle hardened luftwaffe pilot.

The fact that these guys could navigate as well as they did at night, or other adverse conditions behind enemy lines to drop bombs, etc. Really incredible.

Meanwhile, here I am trying to fly a little 172 and I am at around 30 hours. I wonder how many hours a typical fighter pilot had during WWII prior to being deployed?

 

I think I read that they had at least 500 hours of training before they were sent overseas. Even then the squadrons generally sent the senior (most experienced) pilots on missions that could get hairy. The newbies flew even more in theater training flights.

There are plenty of stories about wing commanding officers who flew as wingman to a junior officer who had more combat experience before electing to lead missions themselves.

 

By late in ‘43, ‘44 the Luftwaffe was running out of combat experienced pilots. They never replaced their losses and kept the experience at the front lines, inevitably the odds killed them.

 

A true "fly until you die" staffing policy.

 

Being part of a 141 school mine was less of a surprise since it was mostly scheduled several days a week following a syllabus. However, it was very exciting. We saw other students getting their shirts cut so we always wore two shirts when close to the time. Another person mentioned it on here but I also had the wind change on me after a couple rounds in the pattern and had to switch to the crosswind runway. It was busy and some wouldn't switch while others were so it got a bit scary so I called my CFI while up and told him I was flying just outside of the pattern to setup for the other runway and got the other planes up to follow me lead and was able to land again. After it was a exciting high and many of the other pilots and CFIs came out to show their support. I of course got my shirt cut off and the instructors all took turns drawing on it. I still have it and carry it in my flight bag.