Page 50 - Volume 15 Number 7

Celebrating 100 Years ofNaval AviationGettinG their Feet WetEditor’s Note: This year’s EAA AirVenture will feature a weeklong commemoration of the Centennial of Navy flight, including “Navy Day” on Wednesday, July 27 filled with must-see attractions. In this feature, writer Steve Seibel takes us back to where World War II Navy pilots and support crews got their start, which most of the time happened to be nowhere near water or an aircraft carrier.Naval Air Stations across the country were the first stop for would-be Navy pilots during World War II.At the Kansas State Fair in the fall of 1941, just weeks before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a young Amish man heard the call of the U.S. Navy to join up and see the world. At the time, little did Ira Bontrager know that he would see active duty in Navy aviation just a few miles from his boyhood home.In the months following December 1941 as World War II unfolded, young Bontrager turned from his pacifist upbringing toward wartime patriotism by enlisting in the Navy. While he would eventually see duty in such far-reaching places as the isthmus ofby Steve SeibelPanama and the Galapagos Islands, an essential first task for the U.S. Navy in early 1942 was to establish dozens of additional Naval Air Stations (NAS) in such land-locked places as Hutchinson, Kan.“After my name came up with the draft board, I decided to just enlist and see the world,” recalled Bontrager, now 91 and living at Springfield, Mo. “So within a couple of days I got off the train in Kansas City and received my orders for ‘Hutchinson NAS.’ I thought it must be some mistake, there’s nothing for the Navy back there at Hutchinson.”There was no mistaking the fact, though, that the Navy was preparing to construct a sprawling airfield on some 2,500 acres seven miles south of Hutchinson and a mile west of Yoder, Kan., where Bontrager was born and raised. The Hutchinson site was strategic to providing flight training for Navy cadets. There was plenty of open country with a favorable climate for flying during most of the year, good access to railroad and highway transportation, and – perhaps most important of all – Boeing was building Stearman biplane training48 • TWIN &JULY 2011&&TT TUURRBBIINNEE