Page 55 - Volume 15 Number 7

An inspection by a U.S. Navy admiral was a big event at a Naval Air Station. Here, St. Louis Naval Station personnel are gathered in Hangar No. 1 for the ceremony.cadets and four instructors were killed in training accidents. Of the 3,396 cadets accepted for primary flight training, 2,555 earned their wings. Primary flight training peaked at Hutchinson in November 1943, when 774 cadets were in training.Now, nearly 60 years later, stories remain of some the escapades of Navy cadet pilots at Hutchinson. Before the real-life rigors of wartime carrier deck landings and dogfights with Japanese Zeros, the cadets unofficially honed their piloting skills while hedge-hopping and “buzzing” farmers out working nearby fields.Whenever Bontrager and his surviving brothers (David, the youngest, having actually served as an Army paratrooper in the closing months of “the war”) get together, a recurring story often comes up of a farmer out plowing with his Farmall tractor during very active training near the Hutchinson NAS. The narrative goes that the farmer happened to notice an advancing shadow of an approaching aircraft. He quickly threw the gearshift into neutral and jumped to the ground just as the wheel of a Stearman broke the steering wheel from the tractor – or so the story goes.Ira Bontrager recalls that the initial Navy flight training required overnight cross country trips, three airplanes at a time, to suchdestinations as Denver, Colo., and Little Rock, Ark. He often had the opportunity to accompany the cadets on their initial cross-countries.“I’ll never forget the time we were coming back from Denver in eastern Colorado when one of the pilots noticed a coyote out there on the prairie,” he said. “It took less than a minute and the chase was on. They ran that poor coyote ragged, and from the forward seat Ican still see the lower wing of that Stearman just a few feet above the ground, with the coyote wheeling around and barring his teeth.”By early 1944, the Navy reduced primary flight training activities, and the mission of the Hutchinson station changed to become an advanced operational training center for PB4Y “Liberator” bomber pilots and crews. The PB4Y bombers, derivatives of B-24 bombers andExperience CountsThirty five years of serving General AviationScope Air-craft Fi-nanceHalf Page4/C AdPhoto courtesy of Pilatus Business Aircraft LTD / Photo by Jon Youngblut Photography140 E. Town Street, Suite 1400 • Columbus, Ohio 43215-1400 (614) 221-5773 • Fax: (614) 221-2411email: scope@parknationalbank.com www.ScopeAircraftFinance.comMember ofNational Aircraft Finance Association National Business Aviation AssociationJULY 2011TWIN & TURBINE • 53