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Enlisted Aircrew

 



 

In today's military there are a plethora of jobs that involve aerial flight to some degree, mostly due to mission requirements. This, however, has not always been the case. It really wasn't until World War II that opportunities for flight duty opened up for enlisted men, and it was actually in the 1950s and later that many of today's aircrew jobs came along.
 

On September 28, 1912 Corporal Frank S. Scott had the dubious honor of being the first enlisted man to be killed in an airplane accident when the Wright Flyer he was riding on with Lt. Lewis Rockwell crashed and was demolished. Cpl. Scott was killed in the crash and Rockwell was killed the next day. Scott was not flying as a crewmember, however. He was chief mechanic on one of the Wright Flyer B's assigned to the Army meterological station to which he was assigned. Lt. Rockwell offered to take him along on a flight. Most likely it was the corporal's first - and only - flight.


The following year World War I broke out in Europe, and the airplane became a weapon. Originally, airplanes were used primarily for observation. Although the single-seat pursuit airplane is most associated with the war, observation aircraft carried a pilot and an observer, who were both officers. A handful of US Army enlisted men were trained as pilots but the practice was looked down upon. By 1918 observation aircraft were being used as bombers, but the crews still consisted of a pilot and observer. After The Great War ended, the US Army began developing larger multi-engine airplanes and adding additional crew positions, including gunners. Gunners were enlisted men who were also part of the airplane ground crew. They performed maintenance when the airplane was away from home station and worked on it when they were at home.

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Barling Bomber

In 1920 the Army put out a requirement for a large tri-plane heavy bomber. The Barling Bomber turned out to be grossly underpowered because the Army forced the Air Service to use the World War I Liberty Engine instead of a more powerful recent design. To control the six engines, not one but two flight engineers were part of the crew, the first engineers ever assigned to any aircraft. They were located right behind the pilots and had control over the engines. A radio operator was also part of the crew, along with an observer/navigator. The huge-for-the-time airplane carried seven machine guns located at five stations. Although the Barling turned out to be inadequate, the Army continued developing multiengine bombers, and enlisted gunners and radio operators were part of the crew. Twin-engine airplanes did not carry an engineer as a general rule, although when the Army began purchasing transport aircraft, a need for an enlisted mechanic to accompany them led to the assignment of crew chiefs to flight status. The crew chief's duties included assisting the pilots with monitoring of the engines during takeoff, assisting passengers and supervising the loading and unloading of cargo. Crew chiefs on light and medium bombers flew with their airplane as gunners.

B-17

 In 1935 Boeing flew its four-engine B-17 for the first time. Although it wasn't until 1939 that the Army finally began purchasing them in large numbers, the B-17 set the standard for the four-engine bomber for the next five years. Originally, the crew included as many as five enlisted aircrew positions. The engineer, who was called an aerial engineer rather than a flight engineer, was responsible for assisting the pilot monitor the engines but had no control of them himself. The crew also included a radio operator. The assistant engineer doubled as a gunner, as did the first engineer. Other enlisted crew members served as gunners but also had ground duties as armorers or some kind of mechanical - often called engineering - speciality. Some bombardiers were enlisted.

In 1940 the Air Corps experienced a shortage of qualified applicants for the aviation cadet program, which required a minimum of two years of college. To make up for the shortage, the Army authorized the training of qualified enlisted men as pilots. The first class entered training before the end of the year and graduated in early 1942. Regardless of the rank they held before entering the program, graduates were given the rank of staff sergeant upon graduation. Some 3,000 men became sergeant/pilots. Several classes were trained as fighter pilots and assigned to the 82nd Fighter Group. Most, however, were assigned to what were then called air transport squadrons, but were redesignated as troop carrier squadrons in July, 1942. Most were assigned as copilots on crews commanded by officers but those with the most experience were checked out as first pilots (aircraft commanders.)  As the Army Air Forces expanded, the college requirement for cadets was dropped and soldiers were allowed to apply for the program and commissioned as second lieutenants or flight officers upon completion. With the change, most of the sergeant/pilots were commissioned in the field. Still, enlisted pilots didn't fade away. When a need developed for pilots to fly light airplanes to observe artillery fire, men who had washed out of pilot training were given the opportunity to fly as L-pilots. Nearly all were NCOs. Enlisted pilots also flew gliders, although most were commissioned as flight officers before they went overseas. 

B-24

 The Army wasn't happy with the B-17 due to its lack of range and speed, and put out a requirement for a new heavy bomber with longer range. Consolidated Aircraft developed the B-24, which carried the same crew as the B-17. By 1943 both types were carrying an aerial engineer, his assistant, a radio operator and three gunners, some of whom were specialists of some kind. With the development of radar, enlisted men were trained as radar operators and assigned to pathfinder aircraft where they worked with a bombardier who had been trained to interpret radar images to drop his bombs. A transport version was developed of the B-24 for worldwide transport operations. An aerial engineer and radio operator were part of the crew in addition to the two pilots and a navigator. On passenger missions a third enlisted crewmember was added. At some point they began to be referred to as "flight clerks." In 1942 the Army Air Transport Command began recieving Douglas C-54s, the military version of the Douglas DC-4. They carried the same crew as the C-87 transport but the engineer had his own seat in the cockpit right behind and between the pilots.
 

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Although four-engine transports made an important contribution, the workhorse of the war was the twin-engine transport, particulary the Douglas C-47 and Curtiss C-46. An aerial engineer - often referred to as the crew chief - and radio operator were part of their crews. The crew chief was responsible for everything on the airplane aft of the cockpit, including loading and offloading of cargo and ejecting bundles inflight, with the assistance of the radio operator. In the Southwest Pacific and China-Burma-India areas, enlisted personnel from the unit that owned the cargo flew on the airplane to "kick" the bundles out of the door. As the war continued, air quartermasters were assigned to pack parachutes and rig bundles, then go along to kick them out the door. In the spring of 1944 just before the Normandy Invasion the kicker job was formalized when a company of aviation quartermasters were trained to handle cargo and fly as "dropmasters." Previously, a need for trained medical personnel to fly on air evacuation missions had developed. A school was set up at Bowman Field, Kentucky to train medics and nurses for air evacuation duty.

B-29

In 1943 the Army Air Forces began taking delivery of Boeing's new B-29, an ultra-long range, very heavy bomber that had been under development since 1940. With the advent of the B-29, the flight engineer position was revived. The B-29 flight engineer's crew position was at a panel behind the pilots, where he had his own throttles and was actually responsible for operating them. Now get this, flight engineers were not enlisted - they were officers! In fact, the first batch of B-29 flight engineers were all pilots! They were recent graduates of USAAF pilot training and were assigned to B-29 squadrons to train as flight engineers. In later years the B-29 engineers and those who followed them were often referred to as "performance qualified" because they were given training to compute aircraft performance as accurately as possible using a slide rule and complex formulas. Although the original B-29 flight engineers were all pilots, that didn't last long. Instead, the USAAF began assigning men with aeronautical engineering experience to the program and commissioning them as officers. They were joined by enlisted men with experience as aerial engineers on B-17s and B-24s, who were also commissioned.  To show their status, B-29 flight engineers were awarded special wings with a radial engine and four-bladed propeller in place of the shield.

Flight engineer wings
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Flight engineers were different than the aerial engineers who flew on four engine bombers and transports in that they actually had a role in aircraft operation. Essentially, they had control of the airplane's engines from takeoff to landing, although the pilots could use the throttles when they wanted. Flight engineers were also part of the crew on new four-engine transports - C-74, C-121, C-124 - that came into service in the late 1940s and 1950s. At some point enlisted men were brought into the field and the commissioned engineers moved into other fields, if they remained in service. The last combat aircraft to have a flight engineer as part of the crew was the massive Consolidated B-36, which had no less than ten engines, six rear-mounted reciprocating engines and four jets mounted on pylons under the wings. The B-29 also produced a need for scanners, aircraft mechanics who were placed on flying status to perform inflight duties such as watching the landing gear during extension and retraction and keeping watch on the engines inflight. Scanners were also trained as gunners. Each crew initially included four gunners, one of whom served as fire control officer and was responsible for overall operation of the bombers four gun turrets. B-29 crews also carried a radio operator. Similar duties carried over to the mammoth B-36.

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In 1950 the new US Air Force began taking deliveries on the giant Douglas C-124, a four-engine transport with a double-decked cargo compartment that had been developed from the C-74, a wartime design that had no real military capabilities. Tactical Air Command's Troop Carrier Command wanted a long-range troop carrier transport and Douglas redesigned the C-74 to meet the requirement. The C-124 was a leap forward in transport design. In order to meet the troop carrier requirements, it was fitted with large clamshell doors at the front through which rolling stock could be loaded in addition to the elevator well near the rear. A second deck could be raised along the sides to allow carrying of large items of cargo. To operate all of these systems, the Air Force began training enlisted men, mostly from an air freight background, and designated them as loadmasters. The loadmaster was initially the fourth enlisted man on the C-124 crew. In addition to two flight engineers, one of whom doubled as a scanner, the crew also included a radio operator for a time. Eventually the radio operator position was phased out as newer transistorized radios came into use. During the Korean War the C-124 was the only airplane to carry a loadmaster. Troop carrier C-46s, C-47s and C-119s flew with an aerial engineer or crew chief and a radio operator just as their predecessors had done during World War II. In 1944 IX Troop Carrier Command in England trained air quartermasters to rig cargo bundle for airdrop then accompany them to help the engineer and radio operator eject them from the airplane. They were called dropmasters. In 1947 when the Air Force became a seperate service, the dropmaster and all other quartermaster functions remained with the Army. In Korea Army airborne quartermasters installed airdrop equipment in Air Force C-119s and flew on cargo missions in all three types of aircraft to eject bundles and operate airdrop equipment in flight. They were called "kickers." In 1953 the Air Force reorganized its troop carrier functions and the former kicker responsibility transferred to it and a new loadmaster AFSC was established. C-124 loadmasters were given the same AFSC, which isn't surprising since it was a tactical airplane and several squadrons were assigned to TAC. In the mid-1950s the radio operator position on transport airplanes was being phased out so loadmasters were assigned to crews in order to have another person on board the airplane to handle cargo jettisioning operations if they became necessary. In TAC loadmaster/dropmasters were assigned to newly established aerial port squadrons and attached to troop carrier squadrons for flying while in MATS they were assigned to air transport squadrons.

The last year of World War II saw the advent of an enlisted crewmember called a flight clerk. The name came from the duties of men who were assigned to transports to keep track of high value cargo on flights from Cincinnati, Ohio where the Air Transport Command had a supply depot to India. Flight clerk duties were expanded to include taking care of passengers and they were assigned to scheduled passenger missions operating from New York to Europe and from India to China. Some flight clerks were women. When the Air Force replaced the Air Corps in 1947, the Air Transport Command initially wasn't planned to be a part of it, but it was eventually established as a Department of Defense service operated by the Air Force and the flight clerks became flight stewards. They were later redesignated as flight traffic specialists. Flight traffic specialists were assigned primarily to MATS and a large percentage were female. Flight traffic specialists and loadmasters were often scheduled together and performed the same duties on passenger flights.

The B-36 was the last Air Force combat aircraft to carry a flight engineer as part of its crew. The six-engine Boeing B-47 and eight-engine B-52 were both designed so that the two pilots could operate the eight engines. There was no gunner position on the B-47 either; the airplanes twin tail guns were handled by the copilot. Gunners were part of the B-52 crew until 1991. Yet even as the Air Force moved away from flight engineers on combat airplanes, they remained an important part of the crew on Military Air Transport Command transports. There was a standing joke, which probably was actually true, that the powerful Flight Engineers International Association, an organization representing commercial flight engineers, insisted that all passenger-carrying aircraft had to have a flight engineer as part of its crew. When the Air Force adopted the Boeing 707 as a tanker, the KC-135 did not have a flight engineers station although the C-135, the transport version operated by MATS, did. Furthermore, when MATS became MAC and began recieving C-141s, the C-135s were converted into tankers for Strategic Air Command and the flight engineer stations were removed during the conversion. 

In 1948 Air Force chief of staff General Carl Spaatz ordered the development of air-to-air refueling capabilities and several B-29s and B-50s were equipped with a system consisting of hoses and reels. Enlisted men were trained in their operation and designated as reel operators. Tactical Air Command continued to use KB-50s with reel operators into the early 1960s. Refueling with hoses was time consuming so the Air Force developed a new method using a boom, which allowed fuel transfer at a high operators. Enlisted technicians qualified to operate them were, naturally, called boom operators.

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The outbreak of the Korean War led to the development of a new troop carrier transport. Because it was intended to carry troops and cargo, there wasn't a requirement for a flight engineer but Tactical Air Command decided that it wanted to have someone onboard who could perform limited maintenance at the remote locations where the airplane was planned to operate. TAC also decided that the technician might as well help the pilots monitor engine and systems instruments, as had been the practice on four-engine airplanes since before World War II so they asked Lockheed to install a seat between the pilots. It was not a new concept; the Douglas C-54 and Fairchild C-119 both had cockpit seats for the flight engineer. Flight engineers were part of C-119 crews and were called by that name, but for some reason TAC started calling the engineers assigned to its new C-130 crews "flight mechanics." The change may have been due to changes in the military speciality system identification as the World War II aerial engineer MOS had been eliminated and C-119 flight engineers carried a maintenance AFSC. C-130 engineers also carried either an airplane general or jet engine mechanic AFSC with an A prefix. Initially, C-130 flight mechanics served as their airplane's crew chief and worked on the flight line when they weren't flying. After the first year or so of C-130 operations it had become apparent that demands on the flight mechanics were too great for them to continue to work on the flight line and they were transferred into the troop carrier squadrons. C-130 crews also included a maintenance man who flew as a scanner.

In 1961 the Air Force sent a squadron of C-123 assault transports from Pope AFB, NC to Clark Field, Philippines then on to Saigon in Vietnam. In preparation for the deployment, loadmasters were transferred from the 3rd Aerial Port Squadron to the 346th Troop Carrier Squadron, which had been picked for the move. The transfer set a precedent - soon loadmasters were being assigned to all of TAC's C-130 squadrons. By 1964 loadmaster and scanner responsibilities on the C-130 had been combined. All C-130 flight crews included a loadmaster who flew on all flights while additional loadmasters remained in aerial port squadrons where they inspected Army and Marine Corps cargo and flew with troop carrier squadrons as second loadmaster on airdrops.

 

During the early sixties, the Military Air Transport Service, which became Military Airlift Command on January 1, 1966, managed to convince Congress to fund a new jet transport to replace its fleet of aging C-121s and C-124s. The new C-141 included a flight engineer panel but he did not have control of the throttles as his predecessors had. In late 1968 MAC got a new transport, the gigantic C-5A, which entered operational service in 1970. Like the C-141, the C-5 included a flight engineer's panel but the engineer had no control over the power levers.