Keith Richardson, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, April 2, 2001: Saving the Legacy tape no. 202

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KEITH RICHARD ON APRI 2 2001 KEI: The recruiting office opened up in Salt Lake for a couple of week o I joined the Navy at that time. The Navy occupation I wanted was aviation. I wanted to become a pilot. In fact, I've always wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be a pilot. I went in as a Naval cadet in the aviation branch. The next fourteen months, I was training to be a pilot in the Navy. BEC: Where was that? KEI: We joined in Salt Lake City, here, in August, August 22 of '42. But I wasn't called up until December 1st. And we went down to BYU for a couple of months. The training wasn't really organized very well and they sent me to BYU for ground training and also flying in little Piper Cubs so I could get my private license, at the Provo airport. BEC: Did you do basic training then? KEI: Not a basic training. That was part of ground training. We call it pre-flight training. That was the first aviation training in the Navy I had and then I went to pre-pre­flight school at San Luis Obispo, California; then pre-flight school, more ground training and physical fitness training at St. Mary's then just outside Oakland, California. [Editor's note: Men training as pilots in either the Army Air Corps or the Navy during World War II progressed through several stages of training after passing stringent physical, mental and other examinations. The first stage was preflight, or ground school. The second stage was Primary Flight Training. In Primary Flight Training, most pilot trainees learned to fly single-engine Stearman biplanes. The Stearman was called the PT-13 Kaydet by the Air Corps and N2S by the Navy. It had open tandem cockpits and fixed landing gear. The next training stage was Basic Flight Training. In Basic Flight Training, the men learned to fly in formation, on instruments and learned some 9