U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School
The U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) is the Air Force's advanced flight training school that trains experimental test pilots, flight test engineers, and flight test navigators to carry out tests and evaluations of new aerospace weapon systems and also other aircraft of the U.S. Air Force. This school was established on 9 September 1944 as the Flight Test Training Unit at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (AFB) in Dayton, Ohio. To take advantage of the uncongested skies and the usually superb flying weather, the test pilot school was officially moved to its present location at Edwards Air Force Base in the northwestern Mojave Desert of Southern California on 4 February 1951.
The Test Pilot School was created to formalize and standardize test pilot training in order to reduce the high accident rate during the 1940s and increase the number of productive test flights. In response to the increasing complexity of aircraft and their electronic systems, the school added training programs for flight test engineers and flight test navigators. Between 1962 and 1972, the test pilot school included astronaut training for armed forces test pilots, but these classes were dropped when the U.S. Air Force manned spaceflight program was suspended. Class sizes have been uniformly quite small, with recent classes having about twenty students. The school is a component of the 412th Test Wing of the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC).
Read more about U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School: Mission, Selection Process, Curriculum
Famous quotes containing the words air, force, test, pilot and/or school:
“By the roadside a hideous carrion, quivering
On a clean bed of pebbly clay,
Her legs flexed in the air like a courtesan,
Burning and sweating venomously,
Calmly exposed its belly, ironic and wan,
Clamorous with foul ecstasy.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:Min the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“With two sons born eighteen months apart, I operated mainly on automatic pilot through the ceaseless activity of their early childhood. I remember opening the refrigerator late one night and finding a roll of aluminum foil next to a pair of small red tennies. Certain that I was responsible for the refrigerated shoes, I quickly closed the door and ran upstairs to make sure I had put the babies in their cribs instead of the linen closet.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)