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Company
Chronicles
Central Flying Service
by Lance Phillips
If the companies we’ve been chronicling the last few months have anything in common, it’s that they were aviation pioneers in various geographical regions in the United States, and they were born from a vision es-
tablished shortly after the Wright brothers flew their first heavier than air flight. When the parents of Claud Holbert, themselves from a Tennessee family who’d migrated west to Texas in the 1800s, relocated to the hills of Arkansas, little did they know their son and grandsons would go on to establish Little Rock, Arkansas as a world leader in aviation.
Claud Holbert, born in 1910, didn’t wait a day longer than legally necessary to earn his privilege to fly. He joined the Arkansas Air National Guard at 16. His dad had moved the family to Little Rock from Texas a few years earlier to open an auto parts and repair service, and it was there Claud gained a healthy respect for hard work and motoring. Soloing at 17, Claud also began his higher education and was pinned with officer’s wings in the 154th Observation Squadron of the AANG. He soon saw and then realized a business opportunity – teaching others to fly.
20 • TWIN & TURBINE / April 2022
The world in the late 1930s was eerily similar to what we’re experiencing these days. A European aggressor was invading peaceful neighbors, and the U.S. was do- ing everything it could not to send young people into a foreign conflict. Claud started Central Flying Service in 1939 with a single financed Taylorcraft. He was awarded a contract with the federal government as a civilian pilot training center, or CPT, a program initiated by then-pres- ident Franklin Roosevelt to address the growing need for pilots in the United States. After World War I, people in the U.S. began to look skyward in new ways. Dreams of fly- ing were becoming realized, and the government wanted to support the wave of growth in aviation interest. But as the looming threat of military aggression hit home in the U.S., Central transitioned into a war pilot training center. And in just a few years Central Flying Service became a full-fledged advanced war pilot training center designated by the U.S. government in support of the military, with 65 aircraft and 30 instructors.
The 1940s were a time of explosive growth. Due to WWII, an extraordinary number of aircraft were being built and