To Fill the Skies with Pilots by Dominick A. Pisano

Author:Dominick A. Pisano [Pisano, Dominick A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935623-53-3
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2014-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Changing of the Guard

At about the time that the AAF and CAA had reached an accord on the use of the CPTP, other changes were about to take place that would profoundly affect the program for the remainder of its history. Its New Deal foundations had begun to give way to wartime emergency planning, and a new cast of characters was about to take control.

The CPTP’s originator, Robert Hinckley, had played little or no part in the deliberations between the CAA and the AAF. He preferred instead to let Charles Stanton assume the responsibility while he publicly defended the CPTP and promoted his idea of air age education. Hinckley’s deferral to Stanton was out of character. He had always viewed himself as a public servant and a team player, although he sometimes walked a fine line between invoking the wrath of the aviation community for an unpopular, politically motivated decision or incurring F.D.R.’s displeasure at his unwillingness to go along with White House aviation policy.

But Hinckley had become demoralized by the controversy over the CPTP and the capriciousness of the AAF. Criticism of the CPTP and the failure of the AAF to make better use of the program were evidently the final blows. On June 20, 1942, the New York Times quoted Hinckley, in a speech before the National Aeronautic Association, as saying, “It sometimes happens that a government agency becomes so strong that it loses touch with the people who really own it, and it begins to fight not for the people but for itself.” According to the Times’s account, Hinckley “denied that he had the War Department in mind,” but there was no question that he referred to the air force’s obstinacy about the CAA and the CPTP.33

This was to be Hinckley’s parting shot. A few days later, he resigned as assistant secretary of commerce, effective July 1, to become assistant to the president of the Sperry Corporation. In his letter of resignation, he stressed how difficult his decision had been because “the progress of civil aviation has become almost an obsession with me.… It is only because I am to undertake work of great importance in the war production program which is so closely related to aviation that I do so.”34

Reaction to Hinckley’s departure was predictable; the usual valedictory accolades cited his invaluable contributions to aviation. F.D.R. accepted the resignation “with extreme reluctance” and praised him for his accomplishments and contributing “a decided emphasis on the creative and developmental as contrasted with the purely regulatory aspects of aviation.” The New York Times applauded Hinckley’s “broad vision and devoted interest in the ‘air conditioning’… of America.”35

The tone of the Aero Digest’s editorial, however, was bitter. “Much can be read between the lines in the resignation of Robert H. Hinckley,” it said. “The net result, however, is that aviation loses a Washington representative who has been instrumental in the training of 80,000 civilian pilots, of which number 34,000 are now in the Air Force.… But the brass hat

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