It's Fun

Newcomers at the Roswell (N.M.) Army Air Field were fed up at the prospect of more training: they were graduates of scores of training courses and veterans of at least 1,000 hours in the air, including many in combat. They griped: "What the hell, the B-29 is just another airplane, isn't it?"

But Roswell's officers knew that flying the most complex of all battle planes calls for long study and practice on the ground, regardless of experience. They also knew that time was short and equipment even shorter. Last December they turned their problem over to bouncing, baby-faced Lieut. Carlin E. Rowen, 26, a onetime burlesque song & dance man, who plans to create his own business after the war under the name of "Ideas, Inc."

With 27 helpers, Rowen got busy. Shunning everything that looked like school, he set up workable, toy-like models of the main parts of a B29, beginning with a propeller that could be operated from an exact replica of B-29 controls, and ending with a mockup of a whole plane in which student reactions could be tested when things went wrong. Charts and graphs of fuel and electrical systems were also converted into full-scale mockups, covered with Plexiglas or painted in bright colors so that students could see what happened when they worked the controls. Result: fascinated trainees now finish their course in one-third the previous time.

Mechanical training devices have helped turn millions of raw recruits into an expert army & navy, at a saving of thousands of lives, years of man-hours, millions of dollars. Some of these devices, already adopted by some civilian schools, are bound to have an effect on future vocational training and much liberal arts schooling as well.

Ping-Pong Gun, Portable Planetarium. The air branches of the services became the prime movers in the synthetic devices program. They have invented thousands of efficient gadgets, many of them still secret, ranging from a cardboard pocket blinker for practicing ship signals to a portable planetarium. Some others:

P: A gun that shoots Ping-pong balls, designed for studying the trajectory of machine-gun bullets.

P: A machine consisting of a gunner's cockpit placed in front of a movie screen which simulates aerial dogfighting so well that seasoned veterans have crawled out of it dripping sweat.

The Army Air Forces and, on a larger scale, the Surplus Property Board, have offered to send obsolete and excess equipment to any non-profit school that will pay the transportation costs. So far enthusiastic school heads have asked for almost $20,000,000 worth.*

De Florez & the Future. The Navy has done less promotion, but if any man can be said to have sparked the whole wartime program, it is the Navy's stocky, dynamic Captain Luis de Florez, chief of the Special Devices Division (which was incorporated this month into the Navy's new Office of Research and Inventions). To help solve the Navy's training problems, de Florez gave up a lucrative (about $100,000 a year) practice as consulting engineer to several oil companies. A bland, exuberant genius, he has invented scores of big and little gadgets (including an electric flytrap at the age of eleven). He originated most of the 1,475 projects completed by his office to date, was rewarded with the Legion of Merit last month.

No formal educator, Captain de Florez is nonetheless enthusiastic about the use of his gadgets in peacetime schooling. He believes they "can be applied to the arts and sciences as effectively as to the fields of commercial competition. An assistant puts it more neatly: "They make learning fun."

*Last week the Williamsport (Pa.) Technical Institute received the first surplus B-17 (original cost: $250,000) intact from SPB for $350.

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