George Hoover shown on the outskirts of Visalia Army Air Field, California, where many U.S. pilots received basic flight training. Tex Rankin was president of the Hollywood Motion Picture Pilots Association in December 1940 when he signed a War Department contract to open a school to train U.S. Army pilots. First flights began the following February at Mefford Field, on the outskirts of Tulare, where a B-17 now looks out on U.S. Highway 99. Construction work on Rankin Field, about 6 miles east, began the same month and finished in late spring. Rankin Field became one of the 62 civilian-owned flying schools in the U.S. that taught 1.4 million WW II Army pilots to fly. In 1939, when war broke out in Europe, Army schools had the capacity to train only 750 pilots a year. Recognizing the need to drastically expand, Hap Arnold initiated a program under which civilian schools provided the first 60 hours of flight time to Army Aviation Cadets. The new program was so successful that the U.S. was able to train pilots faster than it could produce aircraft. While Germany lost air superiority because it was not able to replace pilots killed in combat, Arnold’s program began tapering off nine months before D-Day. The Visalia Municipal airport was in existence when construction of another nearby field, Sequoia Field, was started. In the late summer of 1941, a detachment of U.S. Army personnel was sent to Visalia to supervise operations at Sequoia Field. On August 28, 1941, its initial headquarters was set up at Visalia Municipal Airport, and qualification of Sequoia Field’s first contingent of flight instructors began.