Col Dodenhoff – Total Flight Hours 1943 Page – 19431226-450w.png

Subtitle: Still in training in Dec 43

Col Dodenhoff had done plenty of flying in September and October of 43, but only had one flight in November, at Naval Air Station, Pasco, Washington, closeing out the year with 3 flights at Naval Air Station, Corpus Christi.

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Just preceeding this time frame, the Marine Corps had just wrapped up the assault on Tarawa, one of the major battles of the Pacific, that defined the future of amphibious landing tactics and equipment.

Dode now has a total of 139.6 hours in the air, across 100 flights. Of that time, now 82.4 hours have been as a solo pilot, still in the standard basic primary trainer, the N2S-3.

On September 21st, 1943, the Colonel took to the skies by himself. A critical step in the process of learning to fly anywhere, he did so with a total of 12 recorded dual control fight time. He would have been sitting in the aft seat of the N2S-3 BuNo 07759. As a point of reference by today’s training, a civilian private pilot’s license first solo flight doesn’t have a set number of hours to have, but it is at the discretion of the flight instructor to allow the first individual journey into the sky. I would assume (not being an aviator), similar in the military training realm.

He was aloft for 1.5 hours over NAS Corpus Christi (again an assumption on the location). with no notes at all, so it had to be a normal flight. I can’t find anything specific regarding the syllabus for a solo flight during that period, but I’m sure in included a variety of skills to be practiced.

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Here’s some more historical video regarding Navy flight training, but not specific to the first solo flight.

This is the video of the talk given at Tactical Training Croup, Atlantic about April 1993, after having conducted certification of most all of the Atlantic Fleet NSSMS units. LCDR Don Diehl had sat through the Court of Inquiry, having been sent TAD from the USS GEORGE WASHINGTON as COMNAVAIRLANT’s subject matter expert on Combat Direction Center (CDC) Operations. Rather conducting a oral board on the operators on the ships, Don basically told the story of what happened, interspersed with questions of the people who manned the various stations to check their knowledge. In this manner, he helped convey the circumstances, so the other crews could learn from the mistakes. Don has since passed away, but he was a great inspector and instructor for the team across the several months we spent traveling the world together.