My Son just graduated from Air Force basic training at Lackland Airforce Base, San Antonio TX. He grew up helping me work on pinball machines doing the LED's and doing repairs and gained a love for all things mechanical. In High School he asked if he could have a machine to shop out and sell to make money for a band trip to FL. So we worked out a budget and he did all of the work on the machine and sold it minus the parts and cost of the machine to fund his trip. He is going to be doing helicopter maintenance and repair which was inspired by working on pinball machines. While doing a tour of Lackland Air Force base we found this Pinball Airplane. I also posted a picture of the details of this WWII era aircraft. I thought I would share on the forum as I had not heard of this before and wanted to document it. Feel free to post any other pictures, stories and machines related to the Armed Forces.
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Thanks for sharing more on it I had no idea these were important training planes till you shared the article. I liked these quotes...

"The Bell Aircraft RP-63 Kingcobra, affectionately called the Flying Pinball Machine because of a red light on its nose that flashed when a student’s bullets hit the airplane, made its greatest contribution to the war effort as a punching bag on the home front."

"Through most of 1945, the Pinball program gave gunnery students their only realistic practice at aerial combat. In all, some 300 P-63s were converted into Pinballs, but the war’s end made them obsolete."