A typical example of the aeronautical training the Air Corps offers are the courses given by the Air Service Technical School at Chanute Field, Illinois. These courses are given to specially selected enlisted men and to recruits who are sent to the school before they are assigned to units. There are no hard and fast rules governing the entrance requirements, except, perhaps, the three primary qualifications we mentioned before. The School is divided in three departments: one of photography, one of communication, and one of mechanics.
The department of photography has been in operation for five years and is conducted under the most advanced methods. Opportunities in aerial photography are unlimited, both in the military and commercial sense. The work is interesting, varying as it does from the operation of motion picture cameras to photographing large sections of the United States and assembling the hundreds of pictures thus taken into maps. Men trained in this work are needed in war times to map enemy territory in the same manner. In times of peace the aerial photographer is offered many chances for employment by the fact that these aerial maps are displacing blueprints in a great number of engineering projects. An aerial survey was recently taken of Chicago’s lake front. Stretches of land that are heavily covered with undergrowth are practically all being surveyed from the air.
The course in the communications department consists of training for radio mechanics and operators. The use of radio in connection with aviation is gradually assuming greater importance in the commercial field since machines capable of making long ocean flights have been developed. It has always been of prime importance in warfare. Candidates for this course should be interested in radio work, have at least three years in high school or its equivalent, and, though not necessary, training or experience in any of the following lines is desirable:—radio operator, commercial telegrapher or electrician.
The department of mechanics offers training in a number of subjects, such as airplane and auto mechanics, aircraft armorers, and in the construction, repair and inspection of airplanes. This is considered the most important course since airplanes depend on their mechanical well-being. Requirements are a common-school education or its equivalent and some experience in a line similar to the course taken.
These three courses all last about twenty-four weeks. In the first two courses, new classes begin every month; in the mechanics course, every second month. Chanute Field is located at Rantoul, Illinois, 114 miles south of Chicago. The training offered at this field is just an example of the training offered at the many other Air Corps schools. Air Stories will furnish further information in regard to these schools at your request.
If you can’t afford the aviation school and the Army Air Corps doesn’t appeal to you, then the only thing left to do is to hunt a job with an air-transport company or with some organization engaged in the manufacture of airplane parts and accessories. This way might be called the “back-door to aviation.”
The “back-door” isn’t the pleasantest way in the world to get in, but the fact that some of the biggest names in present-day aviation made their start this way, proves that it can be done. They learned the game from the ground up, started at the very bottom of the ladder—and what one man has done can be done again, if you’ve got the stuff.
When you consider the number of organizations operating commercial air routes, the increasing number of companies engaged in the manufacture of airplane parts, the widespread number of smaller companies engaged in aviation, it is easy to understand that there is a chance at the bottom of the ladder now. And the industry is growing so rapidly that every day sees that chance assuming larger proportions.
You want to appreciate right now, though, that getting a job in the air is a mighty tough proposition for the inexperienced man—the same tough proposition that the inexperienced man faces in any line of work. The only solution is to keep on trying and keep on fighting until you do get a job.
Go to some airplane manufacturing company or to some company engaged in commercial flying and try to break in with them. Take anything. Start as a janitor or a painter or an office boy—start at anything as long as you start! If you have the qualifications we noted before, and you have the desire to get in the air, you can make your job take you wherever you want to go.