Aircraft Training Manuals

Learning From The Past

You may not know it, but we have an entire area of the AirCorps Library site that is devoted to aircraft training and student manuals. It's easy to overlook this area of the site, but the fact is that the information contained in these manuals in invaluable. It only takes a few minutes of reading through a 1940s era repair or maintenance manual to know that there were a lot of things that the reader was just expected to know. 80 years ago, most people were familiar with the mechanics of many of the items used in day to day life, because they were fairly simple (in comparison with todays complicated computerized technology). 

However, even if you had been used to working on farm equipment your entire life, if you got a job in an aircraft factory when the war started, or joined the Army Air Corps, there was still a lot to learn. The documents in the student manuals section are what was used to train the young men who would be operating and maintaining warbirds. Today, we can also learn a lot from these documents, and give ourselves the same foundation of knowledge that these men were given in the 1940s.

Maybe the most fun thing about training manuals is that they were often packed with jokes, cartoons, and funny anecdotes to keep students interested!