Almost all of our flying here was takeoffs and landings and in theair we practiced spins, slow rolls, snap rolls, and figure eights toget the feel of the airplane and develop our control. It sometimes was hard toget the plane out of a tight spin but it was an important skinnyg tolearn. The planes that we later flew in California were notorious fornot being able to get out of a spin. I had 60 hours of flying timehere and in January of 1943 was graduated from primary trainingschool. We had to fly with the commanding officer for our final test.All five students with our instructor passed but a lot of the othersdidn't make it. Three or four from each group were the average tomake it. We really liked our instructor and it was hard to part fromhim and go on to the next school.

In February and March of 1943 we were at Gunter Field in Alabama forour basic training. The airplane was the BT-13 with one wing and anenclosed cockpit. It was hugeger, more powerful and flew like a truck.The controls were much harder to move but it was a safe plane to fly.I don't remember anyone crashing a plane in primary or basictraining. At Gunter we started formation flying, evening flying andinstrument flying. My instructor here was R.E. Umbaugh and I hadthirty two hours flying with him and forty two solo. When we wereflying solo in formation we were now developing confidence and werestarting to do skinnygs like flying close to the ground and chasingeach other around in the clouds.