New pilots had to make eight successful landings and takeoffs to become carrier qualified, and many of them did so in a single day. Whether it was in the searing 100degree heat of a humid August pressure cooker or in the bitter minus40-degree gales of a freezing January, operations continued. Having completed flight school at Pensacola, Corpus Christi, or Gross lle, naval pilots received approximately 300 hours of flight time, They first practiced on a flight deck mock-up and then transited to the Carrier Qualification Training Unit at NAS Glenview. There the LSO put them through one day of classes, one day of practice landings, and the third day was the real thing,
At its commissioning, CQTU had 14 fighters, 14 scout bombers, and eight torpedo bombers at its disposal. The young naval pilots would use whatever tired aircraft were available - high-time Texans, Dauntlesses, Wildcats, and later Hellcats, Corsairs or Avengers.
The lightly seasoned pilots would take off from the station's criss-cross runways. Usually they were led by an experienced staff pilot who would guide the novices to their designated landmark - the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette called Point Obo - and then head out to "sea" making radio contact with one of the two mini-flattops. "Fox 28 this is Wolverine. Your bearing is 280 degrees." After sighting the ship, which would be flying two black balls to designate it was prepared to take on aircraft, flight operations would commence. The seasoned pilot would land first, not only showing the young pilots the way, but also bolstering their confidence enough to give them the edge needed to succeed in their own subsequent attempts.
An Ensign Harding logged the 1000th landing on 17 September, just 22 days from the beginning of flight operations... the first casualty occurred 21 October when Ens. Fred Morgan, flying an F4F Wildcat crashed into the deep. His body was never recovered. Most of the attempts, though, were successful. Indeed, on 11 June 1943, while the US 7th Division on the other side of the world landed at Attu in the Aleutian Islands, Lt. Roemer made the 10,000th landing on the Wolverine. Only 289 days had elapsed since operations had been inaugurated, By the time the venerable ship was decommissioned, there had been only 113 barrier crashes and 38 other deck crashes, with three fatalities recorded. However, photographer's mate Ulysses Buffington remembers that "we averaged about one fatality per month." On the USS Yorktown in Charleston, SC, there is an exhibit to honor pilots and crew that died on “all” US aircraft carriers. Why are not the pilots and crew, who died, from the USS Sable and USS Wolverine not honored in that exhibit?
The Sable, though she gets less press, was no slouch in the operations department either. She claimed a record for one day catches on 28 May 1944 with 488 landings in 531 minutes, qualifying 59 pilots, Not to be outdone, the Wolverine snatched 500 aircraft two days before the Normandy invasion (Long puts the figure at 633). James Paxton said, "Both ships were very competitive from the captains down to the apprentice seamen in their attempts to qualify the most pilots. There were many real dock fights between the crews and sometimes the officers, even the captains, over who was the best while waiting for the last liberty boat back to the ships at midnight." (Though the authors could find no final tallies for deaths on the Sable, a newspaper article dated 6 April 1944 states, "A naval aviator operating from the USS Sable was the eighth fatality out of thousands of flights... over a two-year period.")
Source: AirClassics
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