One interesting incident occurred to me during Advanced Training. Cadet Raymond L. Miller from Marion, Indiana, and I were on a cross-country flight over to Gage, Oklahoma. We weren't supposed to land but return after practicing various skills for an allotted time. We were slow flying the aircraft with full flaps and the gear down when the flap control refused to retract the flaps. They operated electrically but the switch refused to work them. This presented a problem, with full flaps we would not be able to fly all the way back to Pampa, Texas, on the fuel we had on board. We had to land at Gage and call in with the account of our problem.

An instructor and mechanic flew over to rescue us. After fiddling with the switch the mechanic got the flaps retracted and since we then had enough fuel to return we flew formation with the instructor and mechanic all the way home. The instructor kept asking us to tighten up the formation so this was some of the tightest formation flying I had flown to that date. We kept our right propeller only inches from his left aileron.

Due to the growing surplus of pilots in all sections of the services we lost more pilots to being washed-out in advanced than in any other part of our training. In May of 1944, I graduated. I was a Pilot Officer, a 2nd Lt. in the Army of the United States. This graduation meant more to me than any before or since but there was no one from my family present. The trip home for the first two-week leave I had since joining up was as a pilot officer. This time there was no troop train, I rode the bus all night and most of the next day. I remember the soil got darker every mile we traveled; from a light tan in the Texas panhandle to a deep red around Oklahoma City, then blacker as we traveled toward NE Oklahoma. I have since learned that there is a lot of rich black topsoil in farming areas throughout the US, but at that time I thought the soil looked better in Ottawa County Oklahoma than anywhere else on earth.