Page 87 - Appendix A

Ivan: You’ve given me a lot of great stuff, this has been good. I want to be mindful of
the time though because I have been trying to keep it at thirty and we are just

about ten minutes over that. I do want to ask you one last question and then
obviously if there’s anything that you want to...

Bob: We could probably do something later but go ahead.

Ivan: Bob were you a pilot, a civilian pilot after that, did you become a commercial pilot?

Bob: Yes, in fact I am the only Tuskegee Airman that was a commercial airline pilot.
Because after the war all of the guys coming back from overseas, a lot of those
nd
guys were discharged at that time because with the group, the 332 fighter group
you were only recording tech orders, you were only flying so many individuals
through that group. So we had too many, we graduated pretty close to a thousand
pilots. Figures, records were pretty lousy at that time and they had 996 at one
time and that was never a really correct answer of how many we graduated. So
they just said roughly about a thousand pilots. And the flight officers they stayed
in during this period of time. All went up to B-25 training at Godman and from
there they went to Michigan, from Michigan back to Freeman Field in Indiana.
There were many flight officers, there were more flight officers at the offices than
second lieutenants and first lieutenants.

Ivan: Wow.

Bob: So there were quite a large group of flight officers.

(Shortened Version of interview)