A BRIEF HISTORY OF US NAVAL TEST PILOT SCHOOL

I stumbled across this website while looking to see if the Department which my Father works with was on the web. I found this instead, a school for test pilots which was near the place where my father worked in Patuxent River, Maryland. My father worked at the Naval Air Warfare Center located in Patuxent River, Maryland, for at least 10 years.

The following below is a little history of the test pilot school in Maryland:

"HISTORY

Fifty-one years have passed since a school, remotely resembling the United States Naval Test Pilot School of today, began training Naval aviators to perform duties as flight test pilots for the purpose of flight test and trials of Naval aircraft. At last year's reunion in April, alumni celebrated the school's golden anniversary.

It all began in 1945 when the Flight Test Group located in Anacostia transferred to the newly established Naval Air Station at Patuxent River. Commander Thomas F. Connolly, assistant flight test officer at the test center, expressed concern to his chief project engineer, Commander Sydney Sherby, that test pilots were unfamiliar with testing techniques. Connolly declared that if flight test was to continue to perform its mission effectively and keep pace with progress in aeronautics, some formal program of education for test pilots and engineers was essential. Sherby agreed, and the two took their idea to Commander C.E. Giese, flight test officer. Giese, recognizing the importance of such training, appointed Sherby to head a committee of three officers to study the matter and report back to him with recommendations.

Sherby proposed that an indoctrination course for Navy Flight test pilots would be ready for review on 1 March. The curriculum was to cover the fundamentals of aerodynamics, procedures for aircraft performance testing, evaluation of aircraft stability and control characteristics, miscellaneous tests and trials, actual in-flight performance testing and flight test reporting in a standardized format. The curriculum was scheduled to fit into 37 hours of classroom work with nine hours of flight time spread over ten weeks. Classes were to meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Giese approved Sherby's recommendations and appointed him officer-in-charge of the Flight Test Pilots' Training Program. Sherby provided the classroom instruction while Lieutenant H. E. McNeely served as flight instructor."



To Be Continued.....