AAF Form No. 5: The Record Behind the Flight

What Is AAF Form No. 5?

Every United States Army Air Forces officer who flew maintained an AAF Form No. 5 (Individual Flight Record) — a monthly ledger of every flight taken, certified under oath by a commanding or operations officer and submitted up the chain of command. For Bob Burns, these forms accumulated from his first solo in 1939 until his retirement as Major General in 1970: roughly 370 monthly forms spanning the War Department era, AAF disbandment, USAF independence, and the jet age.

Each form carried the weight of a legal affidavit. The certifying officer — typically the group's operations officer or the commanding officer — signed it monthly, attesting that the entries were accurate. The form was then forwarded to higher headquarters, where it entered the permanent file. This was not bureaucracy for its own sake: in wartime, the document governed pay, rank, and whether a man's family would receive benefits if he did not come home.

The Anatomy of the Form

The schematic below represents the layout of the standard WAR DEPARTMENT A.A.F. Form No. 5 (Revised) as it appears throughout Bob's WWII-era records (1942–1945). The form's structure was standardized by the Government Printing Office — the GPO mark at the lower right indicates a federally printed standard form rather than a unit-local template.

Schematic represents the WWII-era standard form. Column widths are approximate; actual forms used narrow printed columns for dates and aircraft types.

Annotated Example: August 1943

This month includes Mission #29 — the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid, August 17, 1943 — one of the most costly missions in 8th Air Force history.

Front — flight entries

Back — monthly totals & certifying signature

August 1943  ·  AAF Form No. 5 (Revised)  ·  Major Robert W. Burns  ·  351st Bomb Group (H), Station 110, Polebrook, England

Field Reference — August 1943 Form

Back-page elements not numbered in the column scheme: The back page carries the cumulative rows (This report / Previous reports this F.Y. / Totals this F.Y. / Previous years / Grand total to date), the certifying officer's signature block, and the GPO (Government Printing Office) mark with print-run number — evidence that the form was a federally standardized document, not a locally printed template. For August 1943 the certifying officer was Lt. Col. Ross Milton, Group Operations Officer, 351st BG, who later rose to four-star general.

The Record-Keeping Machine at Polebrook

One of the striking things about these forms is where they were created. In the summer of 1943, as the 351st Bomb Group flew deep into Germany from its base in rural Northamptonshire, someone in the group's administrative section was simultaneously maintaining individual flight records for every pilot on base — logging sorties, tallying hours, and preparing the monthly forms for certification. This was not rear-echelon paperwork. It happened in theater, in wartime, under the same operational tempo that sent aircrews over Schweinfurt.

The paperwork Burns describes — letters to bereaved families, efficiency reports, flight records — was the connective tissue of a combat unit. The group's adjutant and S-1 (personnel) section maintained the Form 5 entries, but the operations officer was the key figure: he had firsthand knowledge of every mission flown, every abort, every training flight, and certified the record monthly.

At the 351st Bomb Group, that certifying officer during much of the 1943 combat period was Major (later Lt. Colonel) Ross Milton, the group operations officer. Burns first encountered Milton on arrival at Polebrook:

Milton's signature appears on Burns' Form 5 records throughout this period, an administrative thread connecting the two men across dozens of missions. Milton would go on to become a four-star general in the postwar Air Force — the same career trajectory Burns himself followed.

This rotation — Hatcher, Burns, Milton — is documented in the Form 5 records. Each month's Command Pilot entries reveal who led the group on which missions, a detail that would otherwise exist only in mission records and debriefings. The seemingly dry administrative form preserves the operational tempo of the group's leadership in a way no narrative account fully captures.

Form No. 5 Across a 31-Year Career

Bob Burns' flight records span four distinct administrative eras, each reflected in the form itself — its header, its column structure, and its certification language. The archive currently covers portions of each phase; digitization is ongoing.

Postwar USAF Assignments  ·  1945–1970

The National Security Act of July 26, 1947 and USAF independence on September 18, 1947 changed the form header from "WAR DEPARTMENT" to "DEPARTMENT OF THE AIR FORCE." Burns' postwar career spanned ten assignments across three continents over 25 years. Forms from this era await digitization.

What the Form Records — and What It Doesn't

Form No. 5 is a flight log, not a career history. It records what was flown and certified in that calendar month. It does not record training curricula, unit equipment lists, or the aircraft an officer was qualified on but didn't happen to fly that month. This distinction matters when using the archive as a reference.

The Flight Log and its aircraft counts reflect only documented aircraft — types that appear by designation in a Form 5 entry in the database. Curriculum-context aircraft shown on career phase pages (such as the Training Phase) are visually distinguished and will move into the documented column as their records are digitized.

Why These Records Survived: The 1973 NPRC Fire

On the morning of July 12, 1973, a fire broke out in the sixth floor of Building 228 at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The building housed the official military personnel files of millions of veterans. By the time firefighters contained the blaze, an estimated 16 to 18 million Army personnel records had been destroyed. There was no water suppression system in the building, no duplicate copies, and the records were stored on highly flammable paper. The loss is considered one of the greatest archival disasters in American history.

Bob Burns' official records at NPRC are therefore likely among those destroyed or compromised. His WWII service fell squarely within the affected period.