To Fill The Skies with Pilots: The Civilian Pilot Training Program, 1939-46

This book examines an area of Franklin D. Roosevelt's aviation policy, the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP). Extending from 1939 to 1946, the CPTP was the first government attempt to use American colleges and universities as settings for training large numbers of pilots. More important, the CPTP was a multipurpose program conceived by Robert H. Hinckley, head of the Civil Aeronautics Authority, to serve as a New Deal economic panacea for private flying (then a neglected segment of the aviation industry) and as a bulwark in the national defense by providing trained pilots. On another level, it was a means of preparing American youth for the emerging air age. Dominick Pisano traces the sometimes colorful, always interesting story of the program from its initial stage of satisfying expectations based largely on civilian goals, through criticism that it was not contributing to military objectives before World War II, to censure by the Army Air Force during the war for not meeting agreed-on training quotas. Ironically, the CPTP trained thousands of military pilots during the war, then languished and died for lack of funding, a victim of ill-defined expectations.