Innovative airmen: celebrating centennial of flight - Air Force chief of staff John P. Jumper - Transcript

Air Force Speeches, April 24, 2003

Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff

Remarks at the General Electric Aviation lecture series, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., April 24, 2003

Thank you very much. Thank you everyone. It is a pleasure to be here tonight and to be able to address this crowd and to share my love of things that fly and to talk a little bit about its history. It's also a pleasure for me to be here tonight with Mr. Pete Teets and his wife Vivian, are up there somewhere--the Undersecretary of the Air Force right here in the middle. When I heard he was coming, I actually had to go practice this a little bit to make sure we could pull this off.

Thanks also to Tom Cooper and General Electric for sponsoring this series. It is not only a marvelous venue but it's an important thing to have this sort of event that we can all share. So I'm very pleased and I appreciate the opportunity to come talk to you.

The history of our air and space power is all about the smart people and the tools that we use in new and different ways. It's all about innovation over the history of powered flight. The airplane has had its place in military history, as we all know, since the very beginning. The Wright Brothers actually started the first aviation school in 1909. They sold the first airplane to the War Department in 1909 for $25,000 and they were awarded a $5,000 bonus after a test flight by Lieutenant Ben Foulois. We can see here the picture of the Wright flyer actually over Fort Myer (Va.) adjacent to the Arlington Cemetery. Ben Foulois actually was given a few hundred dollars and told to go down to Texas and teach himself to fly. That $500 was really the first aviation budget that we had in the old Air Corps.

So when Ben flew that sortie at Fort Myer the acceptance flight was for 10 miles at an average speed of 42.6 miles per hour.

Of course, in World War I we saw the airplane begin to come into its own as an observation aircraft and a pursuit aircraft. It was used to deliver weapons. As you recall the first time we delivered weapons with airplanes it was actually hand-held bombs that were dropped physically out of the cockpit. The accuracy was a little bit off from what our precision is these days. And, of course, the weight of the weapons were such that you could hold them with one hand and drop them outside the cockpit.

They actually had pistols and rifles that they would take airborne with them to shoot at the other guy. In the course of that battle they invented the machine gun and even the synchronized machine gun that fired through the propeller. Again, that was a little slow in developing and first attempts at synchronization resulted in some short propellers and short flights, as a matter of fact.

Then, of course, from that time the airplane is largely credited for rendering the theory of trench warfare obsolete as we went through the end of World War I.

Then, of course, Lindburgh's transoceanic flight was another landmark as we began to shrink the globe over time and get into World War II following the lead of General Jimmy Doolittle in his pioneering work along with General Curtis LeMay and instrument flying. We got into the nighttime business. In World War II we saw actually the advent of radar on airplanes that were part of the war in Europe, and of course radar on the ground that detected airplanes, and even as we all know, the Brits' first attempt to use chaff to jam the radars which they called "Window", if you recall, in World War II.

We produced a lot of airplanes in World War II. 300,000 aircraft were built between the January of 1940 and August of 1945 on VJ day. During that time airmen suffered almost 122,000 casualties. More than 40,000 were killed in action. A lot of them in the daylight precision raids over Germany where you'll recall that on the initial raids we were losing 20 percent of the aircraft that embarked on those raids.

But we got to see the advent of the B-17 and the B-29. The tactics that emerged in World War II were all very interesting to watch. As we approached World War II you remember the Brits actually used formations that they had developed between World War I and World War II with all the flying demonstrations that had been put on, and actually their basic fighting formation was the old "vic" formation with an airplane in the front and two on his wing in fairly close formation. That's the way they began to go into combat. It proved not to be a very useful formation and they spread the formations out a little bit to provide some sort of mutual support, remembering that the range of the guns in World War II on the fighter aircraft were somewhere around 800 to 900 feet. So you had to be letting that guy get up pretty close to you in order to be effective.

Precision bombing was another term that took awhile to evolve. With a Norden bombsight on a calm day in a B-17 in a clear sky you could put a bomb within several hundred feet of the intended target. In the skies over Europe with the marginal weather, as you'll recall, we took hundreds and hundreds of bombs to be able to assure target destruction and, in some cases, because of the weather the target identification was not there at all. What we call collateral damage was overwhelming.