Controversy
The military establishment was initially unenthusiastic about the CPTP concept, quite unimpressed by any program initiated and administered by civilians. Congress, too, was split along mostly party lines as to the value of the CPTP. Isolationists branded the program as provocative saber rattling that threatened the nation's neutrality; others slammed it as a New Deal pork barrel waste of tax dollars, while supporters touted the positive impacts on the aviation industry and the defense value of a vastly enlarged base of trained pilots.
After the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 triggered World War II, the military value of the CPTP became obvious, even to the program's detractors. The United States started to evaluate its ability to fight an air war and the results were appalling. Pilots, instructors, and training aircraft were all in short supply. Acknowledging the shortage of trained pilots, both the Army Air Corps and Navy reluctantly waived certain “elimination” courses for CPTP graduates and allowed them to proceed directly into pilot training.
The Army Air corps deemed the situation to be so grave it proposed that private aviation be suspended and all pilot training (most notably the CPTP) be brought under the control of the military. The December 13, 1940, issue of American Aviation Daily carried this account of the Army's intentions:
“Preliminary plans are understood to be already drafted by the Army to ground all private flying in the U.S. for the duration of the national emergency.…The Army will take over all training (including CPTP).”
The Army's proposal met with stiff resistance. Just two weeks after the American Aviation Daily article appeared, 83 companies with a vested interest in general aviation organized the National Aviation Training Association (NATA). The NATA members recognized that, if left unchallenged, the Army plan would, for all practical purposes, ban private aircraft from the nation's skies. The NATA and other aviation interests blunted the Army's bid with an effective lobbying campaign in Congress. Their actions not only saved the CPTP, they may have saved the entire general aviation industry in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Civilian Pilot Training Program
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)