Word: glider
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TIME'S Wilmott Ragsdale wasn't sure you could do a loop in an Army glider until he went up in one at the new glider school at Twentynine Palms, California -suddenly felt his safety belt tighten and saw the desert above...
Right now Correspondent Ragsdale is making a swing through practically all the specialized training camps of the West. He spent three days at the glider Air Academy at Twentynine Palms -going up with the students, getting the dope on equipment, organization, training. He jolted around with the Army's new tank destroyer corps at Camp Hood in Killeen, Texas, where they had to move a cemetery to get the site they wanted. In the California desert at Indio (very hot in the shade and no shade) he saw our new desert warfare battalions being whipped into shape, heard General...
...forces are operating around the world and the men to make them greater are going through flying and ground schools by the thousands. Glider pilots must be trained (a blind spot until recently with Army airmen), planes for fighting men must be moved, bases must be supplied in the six continents that are the Air Forces' battlefield...
...that point, the U.S. had 154 certificated glider pilots, a bare handful of glider pilot-training schools, and fewer than 200 gliders. By summer's end, the Navy had contracted for 14 experimental gliders, including four to carry troops. A score of Army pilots had entered glider training. Marines were training glider troops, flyers and ground crews. Last September a prominent U.S. gliderman, Philadelphia's lanky, shy Lewin B. Barringer, was appointed civilian director of the Army's training program...
...Gliders are so ridiculously cheap to build (a steel frame is covered with plywood and "doped" fabric), and have such a variety of potential uses, that no one could believe that the U.S. is employing motorless flight only to make its pilots better flyers and to teach them an awareness of wind & weather. A glider full of troops is no home-defense weapon...