In 1939 the Civil Aeronautics Authority assumed the responsibility for training civilian pilots and quickly learned that a set of scientifically established standards for training was needed. To support the effort, the National Research Council created the Committee on Selection and Training of Aircraft Pilots to carry out psychological research projects at various universities, including UT.
The Institute for Aviation Psychology, the first of its kind, was established by the National Research Council at UT in December 1943 to correlate all the experiments. The institute was designed to take the guesswork out of pilot training and to reduce pilot error, listed at the time as the cause of 90 percent of airplane accidents. Over an eighteen-month period, the institute used planes equipped with recording devices and cameras, instruments that assessed proficiency in maneuvers of more than one hundred volunteers. Comparisons of instructor/pilot conversations, combined with camera and instrument evidence, were aimed at determining the relative value of intuitive and didactics instruction measures.