The Vultee BT-13
On the sizable stage of US WW2 military aviation, the Vultee BT-13 Valiant sits quietly in the background. While a fair amount of this is due to the fact that she is a trainer, HOW she trained pilots doesn’t exactly help. A humble creature by design, she didn’t possess the almost romantic flying machine lines of the Stearman that an aviation cadet got his or her first solo in during Primary Flight Training. Nor did she have the then sizzling performance (for a WW2 trainer anyways) of the Texan, a plane used in Advanced Flight Training that many a cadet earmarked for a single engine aircraft looked forward to for cranking out some seriously fun aerobatics. Saddled with a training mission sandwiched between the two, the BT-13 was a learn-the-fundamentals machine, not likely to get the blood pounding as it served to teach you what amounted to crucial yet mundane particulars of flying. More than the other two, it was a two-seat classroom with wings.
28’ long and 42’ from wingtip to wingtip, the Vultee BT-13 strikes more than a passing resemblance to its North American sibling (in fact, those dimensions of the two aircraft are almost identical down to the inch)! Both were tail draggers that had the tandem seating that put the instructor behind his/her trainee charge under a greenhouse canopy. But that’s where the similarities end. The Valiant was a fixed gear aircraft that was equipped with a Prat & Whitney R985 Wasp Jr power plant that put out 450 hp, a full quarter less than the AT-6s. As a result, the BT-13 trails behind her retractable gear counterpart in the performance department by a fair margin.
Not that it matters much when you factor in her mission. The Vultee’s main missions were transitioning the cadet to a heavier aircraft, give him or her a more powerful engine with a two position propeller that had to be managed properly, introduce the fledgling pilot to radios, and providing a full suite of instruments with which the airedale had to use to not only navigate with, but to fly without outside visual references. With that curriculum in mind, the Valiant was an outstanding platform, rocksteady in the air, not so fast as to where the plane was likely to get ahead of the cadet, and rather docile on the ground.
Of course, the plane did have its vices. Under certain engine and prop speed combinations, the airframe shook noticeably, so much so that the plane earned the moniker “Vultee Vibrator” by those who flew it. Additionally, the plane had a notable characteristic of entering a spin when stalled – pilots were wary of this and knew to be quick on the recovery-ball lest one of the wings tucked in as the nose dropped. It was completely aerobatic, one just needed a lot of vertical room for such antics, not to mention a fair amount of time to regain altitude lost in such maneuvers.
During the war, over 7,800 BT-13s were produced by Downey Aircraft and its contractors all around the country. In fact, so popular was the aircraft that there was actually a time when the engine contractor Prat & Whitney could not keep up with the demand for the R985 engine, the plane’s designed power plant; a further 1,600 airframes using the Wright R975 engine rolled off the assembly lines under the designation BT-15.
Despite its success, in the final months of WW2, the USAAF and USN/USMC deemed the Valiant a bit of an excess in the overall pilot training program. With so much experience learned over the years, the program was changed to where the Texan took over the Valiant’s curriculum. Quite suddenly, thousands of BT-13s found themselves out of a job. And when the war ended, many of those Vultees found their way into private hands, where most of them had their fairly compatible engines lopped off for use by Stearman crop dusting pilots who wanted more performance out of their biplanes.