The brave flying classroom from Downey: the Vultee Valiant

A lot of people, myself included, always regard the Texan as the most prolific trainer aircraft ever built in southern California in World War II. However, the Texan itself wasn't the only mass-produced trainer made in southern California during the war, because Vultee undertook development of a monoplane trainer, the Valiant, which became the only mass-produced trainer aircraft to be designated in the BT (Basic Trainer) designation sequence. Despite having a relatively brief military career with the US armed forces, the Valiant itself went on to become the preeminent US military basic trainer of World War II, with over 200,000 new service pilots flown on this aircraft.

An in-flight study of the sole Vultee BC-3 (serial number 39-720), the ancestor of the Vultee Valiant.

The story of the Valiant begins in 1938 when Vultee chief designer Richard Palmer proposed a multi-purpose aircraft progressively derived from the company's V-1 single-engine airliner for use a fighter and trainer. While the fighter design became the Model 48 (US military designation P-66), the trainer iteration, designated Model 51 or BC-51 by Vultee, was submitted for a requirement by the US Army Air Corps for a new Basic Combat (BC) trainer. The Model 51 had an aluminum, semi-monocoque fuselage, a four-panel wing with NACA airfoil sections and slotted flaps, wide-track, inward-retracting main landing gear, and a "greenhouse" cockpit canopy, and power was supplied by one Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp radial piston engine. One Model 51 prototype was completed and it first flew on March 24, 1939, receiving the serial number 39-720 after being delivered to Wright Field on June 24, and the designation BC-3 was assigned to this aircraft. Although the Model 51 met or exceeded performance parameters laid out in the 1938 BC requirement, the Army Air Corps by then had already ordered the rival North American BC-1A design (the immediate ancestor of the AT-6 Texan) into series production, so the Model 51 remained a prototype only. 

Left: A Vultee BT-13A Valiant (serial number 42-1453) at Minter Field near Bakersfield, California, on March 1, 1943.
Right: An in-flight study of an SNV-2 (Navy equivalent of the BT-13B).

Even before the BC-3 flew, Vultee proposed a derivative of the BC-3 with one Wright R-975 Whirlwind radial engine for the export market, the Model 54 Valiant, and it also envisaged the Model 54A basic trainer subvariant of the Valiant with fixed landing gear and one Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp Junior radial engine. The Model 54 prototype (civil registration NX21753) first flew on June 9, 1939, but its performance was disappointing and the aircraft had to be re-engined with an R-1340 to improve speed and altitude capabilities, but not long before it crashed during a test flight on November 15. The Model 54A prototype (civil registration NX21754) made its first flight on July 28, 1939, and on September 16 the US Army Air Corps placed an order for 300 production Model 54As (serial numbers 40-810/1109), assigning the designation BT-13 to the Model 54A basic trainer. Deliveries of the BT-13 Valiant to the USAAC began in June 1940, and one skeletal airframe was built to delivered to the USAAC earlier that year. The BT-13A variant, of which 6,607 aircraft (serial numbers 41-1211/1710, 41-9587/9979, 41-10410/11586, 41-21162/23161, 42-1164/1743, 42-42201/43257 and 42-88674/89573) were built, was fitted with an R-985-AN-1 and lacked wheel fairings. The BT-13B was a BT-13A with 24-volt electrical system, and 1,125 BT-13Bs (serial numbers 42-89574/90698 and 44-31511/32160) were constructed. During the 1941-1942 timeframe, a temporary shortage of R-985 engines led to 1,693 Valiant trainers (41-9980/10409, 42-1744/2063 and 42-41258/42200) being fitted with the R-975 Whirlwind engine and designated BT-15. Of the 3,350 BT-13As ordered under a combined Army-Navy contract for additional BT-13As, 1,350 were delivered to the US Navy with BuNos 02983/03182, 05675/05874, 12492/12991 and 34135/34584 and given the designation SNV-1, with deliveries beginning in mid-1941 (two more SNV-1s were delivered to the US Coast Guard with the serials V222/223). In addition, 650 BT-13Bs were accepted by the Navy with BuNos 44038/44187 and 52050/52549, and the designation SNV-2 was assigned to these aircraft; several SNV-2s were designated SNV-2C after being modified to use an arrestor hook for carrier landings and other carrier-compatible equipment. One BT-13A (41-9777) was designated XBT-16 after being modified by the Vidal Research Corporation with a fuselage and wing empennage made from plastic, but during flight tests in 1942-1943 the XBT-16 came out 110 pounds heavier and 5 miles per hour slower than the BT-13, so it did not enter production.

Left: A BT-13B Valiant (serial number 42-90054) at the Planes of Fame Museum, photographed by me on April 13, 2019. 
Right:A BT-13B Valiant (serial number 42-89607) at the Yanks Air Museum, photographed by me on July 10, 2016.

The Valiant was not only produced in greater numbers than other trainers with BT-series designations but also trained more aircrews than the Texan or any other American aircraft in World War II, partly thanks to Vultee completing production Valiants ahead of schedule. While in service with basic training units of the US Army Air Force Training Command (USAAFTC) and US Navy, the Valiant itself was nicknamed the "Vultee Vibrator" because of its behavior when approaching its quite violent stall (75 mph/clean), so while capable of almost any aerobatic maneuver in skilled hands, its widespread use in a wartime system with a high casualty rate led to it gaining an undeserving reputation as a "Widow Maker". Despite much mishandling, there is no record of an in-flight structural failure occurring to any Valiant aircraft. By the end of World War II, as training requirements diminished, the USAAFTC retired the BT-13 and BT-15 from training units while the Navy withdrew its SNVs from service in May 1945 (the last active SNV-2 was stricken from the Navy inventory in April 1946). Large numbers of Valiant trainers were sold as surplus on the civilian market in the post-World War II environment, many being used for agricultural purposes. From 1942 onwards, Valiant trainers were sold under Lend-Lease to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela, and after World War II forty Valiants were delivered to France, while one Valiant became the first operational aircraft of the Indonesian Air Force and smaller numbers were delivered to Israel, Egypt, and the Philippines. When the US Air Force replaced the AT, BT, and PT basic mission categories with a T-for-Trainer category in 1948, a number of surviving BT-13As were redesignated T-13A (confusingly, Stearman Kaydets still in the Air Force inventory became T-13B and T-13D).

Like the Texan, the Valiant remains popular with warbird collectors and can be seen at airshows across the US. In an interesting footnote, nine Valiants were painted to closely resemble Aichi D3A "Val" dive bombers during the production of the 1970 war film Tora! Tora! Tora! by Twentieth Century Fox (four Texan/Harvard trainers were painted to resemble the Mitsubishi A6M Zero and Nakajima B5N "Kate" for the film as well) due to the fact that no intact examples of the Japanese aircraft used in the attack on Pearl Harbor were airworthy when the movie hit theaters. One of the Valiants painted in the likeness of the "Val" during the filming of Tora! Tora! Tora! is now in airworthy condition as a warbird at the Planes of Fame Museum.