RCAF Station Centralia Flying Instructor George Kercher (centre), with NATO pilot trainees Steiner Wang (Norway), and Piero Brazzola (Italy) - The first NATO member pilot trainees arrived at Centralia in 1950. Steiner “Stan” Wang describes his time at Centralia training with the first NATO arrivals. "My first impression of Canada and Centralia? The Norwegian contingent, nine cadets and myself, travelled by steamer from Norway to New York, then by train from New York to London, Ontario, where the introductory course started. The aim of the course was mainly to learn English, with emphasis how to behave in Canada in general and in the RCAF especially. My first impression of Centralia was that we were heartily welcomed. The officers and their wives were doing their best to make us feel at home. Very early in the course, a fellow student not so fluent in the English language asked me, “Listen Stan, what means the word ‘fast?’” I replied, “Sometimes it means ‘no move’, but today it meant ‘go like hell’”. I may add that the “delinquent” perfected his English considerably before he returned to his homeland. There were two different groups of trainees, cadet trainees and officer trainees, and as such were living in two different messes. The social contact between these two categories were mainly limited to working hours. As I was an officer trainee, my social contact was with the Canadian instructors and the other officer trainees which were, apart from the 10 Italian officers, 2 Belgians, 1 Dutch and myself. As for the cadet trainees, my impression was that the Norwegian cadets made good relations with the Canadian, Belgian and Dutch contingents. The Italian group seemed to keep more to their own nationals than their fellow students from the North-European nations. The reason for this might be that the Italians made a bigger party and created their own self-supporting social group. I had a feeling that it also, to a certain degree, depended on to what extent the individuals wanted to have external acquaintances and practice their English. As I understood from my fellow countrymen, this also applied to the French cadets. During my flying training I had a greater number of different instructors than was desirable, especially in the first period. Despite this, the training routines, both the theoretical and the flying training were excellent and well adapted to the trainees’ background. After the return to Norway, the pilots were posted to different fighter squadrons, mostly flying DeHavilland Vampires, but also Spitfires, which the Royal Norwegian Air Force still had in operation in Northern Norway. Two, including myself, were posted to transport, flying C-47’s.” George Kercher was a flying instructor at Centralia. He recalls his experiences with NATO student pilots. “When Canada started the NATO pilot training, Italy, England, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Holland managed English very well but the French required that Centralia bring bilingual staff F/O’s Michaud, Lemieux, Gagnon and Rivoire. The other staff instructors soon learned to communicate by using multiple words eg. power, gas, throttle, rpm, pitch, mixture loosely implied more power or airspeed was desired. “Lt. Brazzola, during a pre-flight check on a Harvard was perturbed because his long-stemmed pipe couldn’t be held under his mask so he could smoke in the air.” After completing 36 weeks of training at Centralia, some 81 pilots from six NATO nations received their pilot wings in a gala ceremony 18 May 1951. Hon. Brooke Claxton, Minister of Defence, flew into Centralia in a North Star along with Lieutenant Hartley Antonsen, Norwegian air attaché, His Excellency Hubert Guerin (France), His Excellency Mario de Stefano (Italy), His Excellency Vicomte Du Parc (Belgium) and His Excellency A.H.J. Lovink (Netherlands). The wings parade was considered one of the most important events in Canada’s history of international relations.