basis.d counselandora general on the issues facing congress and the music industry over .igital music services by thenterviewed technology reporter for politico. tickets.o buy they keep other fans out of the market. fanswe are finding is some really want to go see a concert, and they can mash the buttons on their computer all day long, but you cannot beat a bot. so they are not able to get tickets in the first run at the list price, so they are left with only the opportunity of

buying those tickets on the secondary market after the bots have gotten them and passed them along to promoters that raise the prices. watch "the communicators" monday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span2. >> each week, american artifacts takes you to museums and historic places to learn about american history. located in virginia beach, virginia, the military aviation museum is home to one of the largest collections of artifacts from world war i and world war ii. we toured the world war ii hangar with mike spalding and took a flight in a trainer plane to learn how pilots prepared for combat. this is the second of a two-part program. mike: i'm the chief pilot for the military aviation museum in virginia beach, virginia. i'm in charge of all of the airplanes and the training for the museum and the pilots.

and today, we are going to talk about the boeing stearman. they had different numbers depending on the service it was in, whether it was in the navy or whether it was in the air force. it could be a pt-13 or pt-17 if it was in the army air corps back then. it went by the name of kaydet. the navy called them the yellow peril, because it can be a handful airplane for the first airplane you are learning to fly. but it sets you up for your progression into more complicated airplanes. but this airplane, among a couple other types, basically taught all the military aviators how to fly. and many guys never even saw an airplane coming from the farms and anywhere you can think of. the first airplane they saw was the boeing stearman.

the reason they use this airplane is very basic. it is mostly made out of wood. and held together by steel flying wires and then covered in a fabric back then which was a cotton fabric and with like a material they used to stiffen it up. there is more modern stuff they use on them today to make them last longer, but a lot of the reason they made tens of thousands of them, and there are only several hundred left today, is because they were not meant to last. they were made of wood and fabric and sat out in the elements and pretty much if they did not get destroyed in training, they rotted away. and were just scrapped. but this was the first airplane that they all flew, and we're going to take a flight in it today. we will tell you a couple things about it, so that when we fly you know what you're looking at. , it is a very basic airplane. it basically has just the basic

instruments that you need to fly an airplane. an airspeed indicator, an altimeter. you do not even need an outdated indicator because you look out the window. you are just learning how to get the airplane off the ground, do coordinated turns and come back in an land it and do that continually successfully. in the program that both the army air corps and the navy had , not everybody was able to get the hang of it and do it. so, what happened then is you washed out. at any point in the whole training program, in the beginning, washout basically means that instead of flying airplanes you will be carrying a gun in the infantry or something or cutting potatoes, who knows? but anyway, you do not get to fly. so, many of them made it, but there was always a certain level and percentage that didn't. many of them might even get to solo. and then they cannot just seem

to get beyond that without tearing something up. so they are out. but in any case, they all learn to fly in it. then they went from this, which was a basic trainer, which means you learn the basics of flying till you move on to an advanced trainer where you have a lot more controls in the airplane and it is lot more fighter like. from there, everyone goes to wherever they go, in a bomber a fighter. it did not matter where you were going, you went to that progression as a basic trainer and then the advanced trainer. and in here the student sits in the back. it is a little harder to see. but these old types of conventional gear airplanes, you cannot see out the front. do s turns have to when you are taxing out. look out the side to make sure you're not going to run into anything. the instructor sits in the

front. and it's a pretty crude type of intercom back then that basically was a tube. a little bit more modern than the can and the string but the ube does not have to be tight. you talk through the mask and they can hear you through the backside. that is how they communicated. sometimes with hand signals. there is also a mirror where you would look at each other and they would communicate with hand signals. at first you go out, take off and learn how to fly the airplane, do turns, maneuvers and do them in a coordinated fashion. there is a needle and a ball in there. the ball in your turns, you want to keep centered. if you do that, it is a coordinated turn. otherwise the airplane is , skidding around. you want to get to where you are not doing that. when you learn to fly the airplane in the air, and you can maneuver it around the pattern,

that is when we come back in and you start learning how to take off and land. the landing is always the last thing you get. and that is the last part of the progression. because it is the hardest part. to do it continuously and over and over again. when you do that, the instructor solos you. that is when he gets out and you do your first flight by yourself. and that is quite a mark in your aviation, something you never forget. so, after they do that, they will do many hours of just solo flights, and then they will do solo cross-country's, start learning how to navigate across country and go from one airport to another and get where they are going and back safely. and this whole progression takes about a year. and they have a couple hundred hours in primary and the advanced trainers by the time they are ready to move onto the

airplane they will fly when they get out. they are open cockpit airplanes. that was kind of the normal thing back then. they had training bases all over the country. it was the north and the south. if you were lucky, you got to train down in florida and mississippi. if not so lucky, you trained in minnesota and you wore bigger coats. but they all wore helmets and goggles and trained year-round. so they dressed for it. there was a war on, so you have to do what you had to do. it was probably the most comfortable you were going to be by the time you ended up going overseas. so, everybody was exposed to the elements. hot can be as bad as cold when you are down in southern florida with the humidity and 95 degrees and you got a flight suit and everything on. so, it wasn't easy. and it could be pretty grueling just on you physically, not to mention mentally.

but we had the best trained pilots in the world. we did have a very regimented pilot training program that was in line with some of our allies, but many of the axis aircraft and countries did not have the type of training program we had . and they kind of rushed them into it, which is what helped us is the quality of our pilots and their abilities. and sometimes they did not even have the best machine, but could out fly better enemy machines just because of their abilities. this model trainer carries 46 gallons of fuel. it burns 12 gallons an hour. there close top four hours with no problem. and that is good for cross-country stuff, but it's mostly designed just for the local area and the short cross-country type thing. but again, you have to take it cross-country in minnesota in

january, an open cockpit you , want them to be short. these kids, like i said, had never seen an airplane. it was just like anybody walking in off the street and taking a ride. it is very, it is not windy in the airplane but you stick your hand out there and you can feel what makes the wings work. and that is part of the aerodynamics of them learning. you can feel the elements outside, where in the closed cockpit or even the fighters they went to, or even the advanced trainer when they had closed in cockpits, you kind of lose that other sense of your speed and that you're moving. this is a north american at-6. a.t. meaning advanced trainer. remember we started out with the , primary trainer which is what

you learned to fly in. and after you learned to fly, you went to the advanced trainer. the navy called it an snj. they had their own name for it , for all their airplanes, but it is the same thing as the at-6. from here, what's basically different is you can see it has a canopy on it. it close up just like a fighter would or the bomber you're going to fly. much bigger engine. retractable landing gear. all these advanced features that the primary trainers don't have. so, that is what you are learning here. it goes a lot faster. you are learning to put the gear up and down. manipulate the engine differently, depending on your flight characteristics that you are in at the time. this progression is about as long as the other because you are learning a lot more about the aerodynamics and the speed

, not just the basic flying. you're taking everything you learned there applying it here, , and expanding it. the air force and the navy had them, as i said. the navy had sung with tale looks -- tail hooks on them. so, if you would end up going to carrier training you would do , carrier training in this first before you went in your fighter. they had a lot more instruments. they used them to train, to do your strafing runs, machine gun work, some bombing. depending on what you were going in. so, the advanced part of the training could go in all different directions. it was used for a lot of things after you learn how to fly. basically to learn then to teach you how to fly something much faster and much more advanced that you would be getting into after you left here. the at-6 was primarily used for training.

later in the war, they did use some for combat. not very many. they did arm some up and use them and it had specific purposes for that, some kind of short range, low altitude bombing and strafing type things for a specific need they had, but in general, it was used for training. again, the instructor at this time sits in the back in the -- and the student sits up front. it was like he was sitting in the fighter upfront by himself and flying the fighter type airplane. but you learned everything you were going to do in the fighter in this. your aerobatics, also. they would be more fighter like. so you could learn how to do combat and be very comfortable doing whatever you needed to do with the airplane to get a kill or keep from getting killed. with every hour you flew, there were many hours of classroom training and studying the books.

that is why it took so long. it was not just the flying part. there was a lot of classrooms in groups. and the manuals you had to study yourself and to keep from getting washed out. because you could get washed out at any point in this program pretty much until you got up to the fighters where they felt they had spent enough effort on you you're going to make this at this point. at any point in training, you could get washed out. if you notice, the trainers were all very brightly colored. all the training bases had their own markings and their own ways of identifying where they were from, but they were all really brightly colored. and that was so they could find you. if you had an issue or your were notmewhere you

supposed to be, it was very easy to spot from the air, because a lot of times they did not have radios. they had to go out and look for you if you did not come back. it was much easier to find you if you had an incident somewhere when you were off by yourself. progressing on, after you got out of flight training and now you have got your wings and you are going out to either a fighter or a bomber or something, wherever they put you, one of the early modern fighters we had was the p-40 which most people recognize with the sharks teeth. it was a very good airplane. very instrumental. we used it, the chinese used it. and many of -- are familiar with the flying tigers which is what this paint scheme is for. but the paint schemes varied depending on where they were in the world to match to lay of the land, basically. most of them are camouflaged or olive drab green so that enemy

aircraft above it would have a hard time finding you. a lot of times they were light colored underneath so if they were below you, they could not see looking up at them. there was a reason they are painted on a lot of times the colors they are painted, but much of the markings and things on the side, some of them are personalized by the specific pilot and basically called nose art. this airplane is in the markings of tex hill flying tigers. when it was over in china. the big thing about these airplanes is now they have moved to a much faster airplane, a lot more horsepower. much bigger engine. it was a very good fighter. the only thing that came with this thing, it ended up being under-powered to help out the bombers. it could not go high because it

did not have a second stage supercharger. they had a single stage. so we did very well down low and strafing at all, but the bombers flew high. it could not get up to help them out or get itself out of another fighter's way. when the p-51, came along, had the same engine, but the british in the p-51 put the merlin engine in it, which had the second stage supercharger. then they could fly really high and fast and a long way. strafing is when you go really fast and go down and get right on the ground and you start shooting your guns and just shooting at whatever needs to be shot at. trains or a convoy of vehicles or buildings. but you are basically right at the treetops and unloading the guns. then pack up and go and do it again or when you're out of ammo, save a bit to get back.

then you head back. basically strafing is just dived down, get right on the ground, shoot everything you intended to shoot and then back up. strafing is not even always planned. you are supporting your ground crew and the infantry down there. you may be able to see things they can't. you will clear the way for them by strafing and blowing up tanks or armored vehicles or the other infantry. so, you may see nothing or you may have the mission and you could be out there are couple hours. usually, you run out of ammo before you run out of fuel. if you're out there just strictly strafing. now here we have the p-51. almost everyone recognizes that p-51, because it looks like it is going fast just sitting here. very sleek, fast airplane. it almost didn't come to be,

however, because it had the same engine in it as the p-40. and this is a much heavier airplane. so it really was not doing the job and it couldn't really get out of its own way. it was good for low-level strafing and bombing and stuff, but that is not what they wanted. they really needed support for the bombers to help the bombers out. it took the british to say, hey, let's put our merlin supercharged in the airplane and see what we can do with it. and that is what saved the airplane and made the airplane what it was. as in most airplanes, the guns were in the wings. not all of them. early ones, they had them in the nose. and they would time it with the engine so it would go through the propeller and not hit the propeller. but it was much easier to put them in the wings. the guns would sit right here, and this door would come up. they laid all the ammo out and

in a nest fashion so it would feed properly and it comes out the chutes in the bottom. this is where all the guns and the ammo were. when they pulled the trigger -- when you pull the trigger, it shot guns on both sides at the same time because it would give you some yar if you did one side or the other. it would be kind of hard to aim. so, they shot together so you would stay straight. usually about every fifth round was a luminary or luminescence so you could see it. it would kind of heat up so you could see where your bullets were going, otherwise you had no idea where they were going. and you'll see that in some of the footage when you look at world war ii footage. you see the gun cameras. most had gun cameras so they could monitor the kills and document the kills. all the fighter pilots were trying to become an ace.

to be an ace, you had to have five kills. and oddly enough, some guys never got there. and some got there on their first day out. not many of those, but there were some that just had that skill level or luck level to get them all five right at once. it took five kills to be an ace. and every kill, you got the flag of the adversary on your airplane to mark your kill. everybody wore a parachute or had it available to them. in a fighter, of course, you are going to wear it because you cannot put it on after the fact. a lot of the bombers may or may not wear them. but they were in the airplane because you had to maneuver around. so you had to maneuver around the airplane.

either had it available to you or usually wasn't a split-second thing. if you were going to have to jump out of that, you did not have time to put it on or waited for the captain to call bail out, because he gave the command to bail out unless it was obvious something else was going on. but here you are pretty much by yourself. you have it on. your parachute is also your seat cushion. you are sitting on it so you do not have it behind you or restraining you in any way. to bail out, all the canopies had emergency release. so the canopy would go away. there were various ways of getting out. sometimes it had to be whatever it took. but you would normally just kind of get up on your knees and lean over the side and you would go down below the horizontal stabilizer and out. the lower the better, but sometimes you had to get out. if it is on fire, you wanted to get out of it. as most army airplanes were

used, not specifically but mostly all in the european theater, because it was mostly land over there. you took off from europe somewhere and went over to germany or from the allied side. there was basically river in between the battles. the navy stuff was a little different. there was a lot of water. they were on boats and things like that. but the army stuff was mostly in the european theater or land-based operations. just like we talked about before p-fo4 being very early of the modern fighters that we had, for world war ii, this was the navy version of a very early fighter. these are grumman-built. back during the war, there were trying to produce so many airplanes that grumman in this case could not build them all themselves, so they contracted out to general motors or other companies, in this case, general motors.

general motors built a lot of the grumman airplanes in the general motors factories. the automotive general motors. this is an fm-2 wildcat. it is a very simple airplane. it derived from a biplane. that was fixed gear. before world war ii, but it was a carrier-based airplane. basically, they took it, modernized it, took the top wing off. the earlier ones did not have folding wings. shortly after, they did that. the reason the wings fold is so they can get on the carrier and then make them small. they would fold them up and make them small and put them over the side or go down the elevator and park them underneath. this airplane was really very basic. everything on it is mechanical. you crank the gear up with a hand crank and there is a chain and it pulls the landing gear up and put them back down that way.

flaps used air off the engine to put them down. everything else on it is done by hand. all the flaps are cranks and handles and things like that. very almost world war i-ish in the transition. the wildcat was very successful . except when it started flying against the japanese the zero zero. was very nimble, which this is also, but the zero is very light and when they were trying to do escape maneuvers and pull up, the zero could out climate and and get out-climb it them. what came after the wildcat was the hell cat, and that turned the tables on the japanese and the zero. this is the grumman tbm.

t.b. stands for torpedo bomber. the m stands for general motors. it was built by general motors, much like studebaker built engines for the b-17. so, many of them got into the war effort. it was everything towards trying to win the war. a lot of production of cars and airplanes for recreation and things like that didn't go necessarily by the wayside that -- but were severely cut back in an effort to win the war. the tbm, again, another carrier-based airplane. as you can see, much bigger. everything on it is hydraulic. you could not do anything by hand in these airplanes. everything now is hydraulic. wingsmbay doors, the hydraulics the landing gear is

hydraulic. everything in there is hydraulic. it took a crew of three. you had a bombardier and you had a gunner. in the back. and in the top. and, of course, the pilot. they basically operated off carriers and would go out and torpedo bomb japanese ships in the pacific and that sort of thing. the cow flaps, i mentioned before, they are more noticeable on this. like little gills on the cowling. that is to control the temperature of the engine, so you can control how much air flows through the front and out. so if it gets too hot, you open it up and you can control the temperature on the engine or close them if it is getting too cold to regulate the engine temperature. most all the airplanes were assigned it to a specific pilot. they very rarely interchanged. i will not say they never did,

but that is why you see even today the militatary fighters , have the name of the pilot on airplane. that is their airplane. it is a sign to them the--it is assigned to them. it has a crew chief on it, they are responsible for it or the bombardiers flew with a crew. this was their airplane. unless somebody was sick or had an issue or was shipped home, it had the same crew, same pilot, same crew. that was pretty much standard throughout the military whichever side you were on. bombardiers had their own training. they used what a lot of people known as -- the navy called them snd's. and they had various other airplanes that they used that they did specifically to train them to use the bomb sites and the drop torpedoes and drop the bombs and do whatever else they did. but they had their own specific training program.

and then they all came together when they were assigned to their airplane or their unit. the tbm was involved in a lot of the pacific, the turkey shoot. this particular airplane was the type that george h.w. bush ditched and was flying when he was rescued out of the pacific. so that is what kind of helped make this airplane famous as well. this was the premier navy fighter, as everyone knows, the corsair. an f-4u is what the official designation was, but this particular model is an fg1-d. f meaning fighter, and g means it was made by goodyear. goodyear was in the also, just like

general members -- general motors, studebaker, and others. so, this one has folding wings, also, just like all the other navy airplanes. being a navy fighter, an engine, which is very big, almost 3000 horsepower engine. most people recognize this airplane because of its bent wings. that is its own look. nothing else of a fighter type really has that that you would recognize. the reason they do that is so the landing gear does not have to be so long. it did not have anything to do with aerodynamics or anything like that. it was so they could keep the it wouldear shorter so fold up in the wheel wells. and the reason they needed to do that is because the propeller right here, it has got such a long propeller, it comes close to the ground where you can see it was hanging down. it would only be that far off. the prop would be close to the

ground so it was for propeller clearance was the only reason it was designed like that. i want to thank you for coming by and taking a small tour of the military aviation museum. we have many more airplanes, about 50 flying airplanes. again, that was just a small sampling. come by and see us. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> you can watch this and other american artifacts programs by visiting our website at c-span.org/history. on the morning of december 7, 1941, japanese lanes attacked the u.s. fleet at pearl harbor. theican history tv marks 75th anniversary of a surprise attack on saturday, december 10, beginning at 8:00 a.m. eastern. we will show archival films, first-person accounts from veterans and civilians, and the th