1.2.9. A few enlisted men, against official and semi-official military prejudice, learned to fly. The majority of enlisted men were absorbed in the tasks of getting the fragile balloons and even flimsier planes of the day into the air and keeping them there. Of necessity flexible and innovative, early crews often had to rebuild aircraft from the ground up after every crash—and, in those early days of flight; crashes were the rule rather than the exception. Enlisted crews not only repaired the planes, they labored to make some of the more ill-designed craft airworthy in the first place.