>>64500981
>expensive pilots
In WW1 the US Army Airforce was training biplane pilots on average in 7-8 weeks, around 15% of them didn't even know how to drive a car before they began training to fly a aircraft. You could walk into your local supermarket, grab a random 12-13 year old child and two or three months later turn her into a Po-2 pilot.
WW1 biplane pilots have stated many times in their biographies that learning to fly a biplane was easier than learning how to drive car, some of them couldn't drive a car but they could fly.