July 27, 1943
11:35 A.M. Tues
Dear Folks:
Well I have about 30 min. before dinner. I got a letter from you. Yes I noticed too that the mail travels faster here. I get mail in 2 days a lot of the time.
Yesterday we went on a cross-country flight. It was about 345 miles long. I made it in 3 hrs. and 10 min. On these flights you have to depend on your compass pretty much. I hit all 3 points right on the nose. We had to land at 2 little dinky airports. Some of the boys got lost. Some got back to the home field with just a few gallons of gas. Two of them got lost. They finally found one of the other fields but they didn’t have enough gas to get home. So they had to draw gas out of the other planes. These things use about 30 gals. an hour.
Today we go on another cross-country. On this one they don’t tell us where we’re going until we get to the flight line. We have to make our own plans in a few minutes. We have to fly this at 1500 ft. Which will be only about 700 ft. above the ground part of the way. At that height you can’t see very far. So we have to really hit those fields on the nose. We have a pretty good idea where the trip will be. The airports look just like a pasture field. They are right in a woods and they say it is pretty hard to find them. So I’ll find out how good a navigator I am. We have a night class in instruments now. We will fly nights one night and take the class the next night. So it looks to me like our evenings will be pretty well taken care of.
Well it finally cooled off a little bit. It rained last night a little bit. Looks like you folks will have plenty of meat next winter. You’ll have quite a few hens too. Won’t you?
Well it’s about dinner time.
9:15 p.m. I just got time to close. We had a class from 7:45 til 8:45. I got around my cross-country okay. It was 270 miles long. It took me 2 hrs. 50 min. Several boys got lost. One of these is still gone. Both fields we landed at were just little old cow pastures practically. Well I better close for now.
So long,
Alva
Ancestors Across the Ages 