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Oliver Parks
Summary
Oliver L. "Lafe" Parks (June 10, 1899 - February 28, 1985) was a pioneer in the fields of pilot training and aviation studies in the early decades of aviation.
Parks' career started as a Chevrolet salesman at the Gravois Motor corporation in St. Louis. He learned to fly in 1926. Combining his sales and piloting skills, Parks flew a Standard J with the Gravois Motor logo painted on the fuselage and wings.
A friend of Charles Lindbergh, Parks founded the Parks Air College at Lambert Field, St Louis, in 1927 and quickly established higher standards for the amount and quality of training that student pilots were required to complete to earn their commercial pilot's certification.
In the late 1930s, with war brewing again in Europe, Parks convinced the United States Army Air Corps that the training program at his college could adequately prepare military pilots for combat missions. In October 1938, General Hap Arnold asked the top three aviation school representatives - Oliver Parks, C. C. Moseley of the Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute, and Theopholis Lee of the Boeing School of Aeronautics - to establish an unfunded startup of Civilian Pilot Training Program schools at their own risk; all three agreed. In 1939, Parks was brought to Alabama to set up a Civilian Pilot Training Program for the University of Alabama at Van de Graaff Field. In 1940, he leased all of Curtiss-Steinberg Airport (now St. Louis Downtown Airport), which was renamed Curtiss-Parks Airport, for his school. By the end of World War II, more than 37,000 cadets (more than 10% of the Air Corps and "fully one-sixth of all U.S. Army pilots of the era") had received their primary flight instruction at a Parks school.
In 1944, Parks conducted a nationwide survey to see what features the potential pool of 70,000 new post-war pilots would want in a personal aircraft. When the wartime training program was phased out that year, he went to work for the Engineering and Research Corporation (ERCO).
Official source
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