Question: How many pilots were there in 1968?
About the article "Vietnam War", section "North Korea".

Candidate passages:
There was a brief pilots’ strike in 1924 about pay, conditions and a particularly abrasive manager, Major Woods Humphrey.
However the trigger which led to the creation of BALPA in the late thirties was the irresponsible attitude of Imperial Airways towards safety issues and particularly the risk of airframe icing on one type.
Eric Lane Burslem, eventually BALPA’s first chairman, briefed by the American pilots on how to set up a pilots’ association, worked with others to create an ‘Organising Committee’.
This met on 18 May 1937 to draft the association rules which were put to a mass meeting of pilots on 27 June.
Either of these dates could be regarded as the birthday of BALPA.
Imperial Airways and Woods Humphries initiated a programme of intimidation including slander and sackings of BALPA members.
Other airlines either stood on the sidelines but some were supportive.
Robert Perkins, a Conservative MP, supported the pilots and initiated a debate in Parliament which led to the formation of the Cadman Committee of Inquiry.
Their report recommended massive changes in British commercial aviation, including airline mergers to create in 1939, British Overseas Airways Corporation, a new airline under new managers including its chairman Sir John Reith (founder of the BBC).
Woods Humphrey was forced to resign.
During the Second World War there was little truly commercial flying.
(Some BOAC pilots flew civilian registered Mosquito bombers collecting essential ball bearings from Sweden).
A number of BALPA’s founders were killed on active service.
However the association was not inactive and in 1943 it affiliated to the TUC and signed a memorandum of understanding with Canadian and American pilots leading eventually to the creation of the International Federation of Airline Pilots’ Associations (IFALPA).
In 1944 the new BOAC pilots’ contract made them the first employees anywhere to receive an occupational pension.
In 1946 BOAC was nationalised whilst British European Airways (BEA) and British South American Airways were set up by the Government.
The same year BALPA joined in the creation of the National Joint Council for Civil Aviation.
Between 1947 and 1966 BALPA membership rose from one thousand plus to over three thousand.
From 1946 until 1962 the much respected general secretary was Dennis Follows who eventually left the Association to become chairman of The Football Association and then chairman of the British Olympic Association.
The sixties were a troubled time with much pilot unrest.
The association disaffiliated from the NJC in 1967 and in 1968 there were two strikes of BOAC pilots.
During this period Mark Young, then with the Electrical Trades Union (and also on the trades union side of the NJC) had acted as an ‘honest broker’ between the two sides.
After a period of giving informal help to BALPA during which he helped avoid a BEA pilots strike in 1972, he was formally appointed a general secretary in 1974.BEA and BOAC were united under one board in 1972 and were merged with Cambrian Airways and Northeast Airways to form British Airways in 1974.
During the ensuing fifteen or so years, under the wily leadership of Mark Young, BALPA members saw their real salaries and conditions increase substantially.
This was especially true in BA and there was some resentment among non BA pilots who sometimes referred to BALPA as the ‘British Airways Pilot’s Association’ (although they too saw improvements).
In 1977 BALPA joined Europilote, a European wide association of pilots’ unions.
As the political and regulatory structure of Europe changed it was felt that Europilote should change too.
BALPA was one of the founder members of the European Cockpit Association (ECA) dedicated to ensuring that the pilots’ voice was clearly heard in Brussels.
Perhaps the ECA’s most auspicious battle has been with the politicians and bureaucrats of Brussels over the issue of flight and duty-time limitations and BALPA’s input to this debate has been considerable.
When Mark Young died in 1991 the membership was above 5000.
In 1992 Chris Darke was elected General Secretary and the balance between BA and non BA pilots within the association started to tilt away from BA as the non-BA airlines proliferated and BALPA membership in them increased.
A full BA strike was narrowly averted in 1996.
In the late nineties and into the new century new low cost airlines expanded rapidly giving BALPA many problems in representing their pilots.
In 2006 BALPA won a court case brought against it by Ryanair.
The judge condemned Ryanair’s evidence to the Court and directed that the airline had to pay all the Association’s substantial costs.
In 2000 Virgin Atlantic Airways became a BALPA airline.
As the membership passed seven thousand in 1997, Chris Darke was re-elected but he was voted out of office in 2002.
After a period of some confusion Jim McAuslan was elected General Secretary in 2003.BA had a further confrontation with its pilots in 2008 over the establishment of its new low cost airline in Europe and the BA pilots staged a protest march at Heathrow Airport.
In 2008 BALPA membership passed ten thousand for the first time.
[http://www.balpa.org/] 
In Vietnam War, many Vietnamese pilots had notable achievements, and were honored in as "aces".
About the other pilots, see Safarik's comprehensive list. 
Before the war, the RAF's processes for selecting potential candidates were opened to men of all social classes through the creation of the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1936 which "... was designed to appeal, to ... young men ... without any class distinctions ..." The older squadrons of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force did retain some of their upper-class exclusiveness but their number were soon swamped by the newcomers of the RAFVR and by 1 September 1939, 6646 pilots had been trained through the RAFVR.
By summer 1940, there were about 9,000 pilots in the RAF for approximately 5,000 aircraft, most of which were bombers.
Fighter Command was never short of pilots, but the problem of finding sufficient numbers of fully trained fighter pilots became acute by mid-August 1940.
With aircraft production running at 300 each week, only 200 pilots were trained in the same period.
In addition, more pilots were allocated to squadrons than there were aircraft, as this allowed squadrons to maintain operational strength despite casualties and still provide for pilot leave.
Another factor was that only about 30% of the 9,000 pilots were assigned to operational squadrons; 20% of the pilots were involved in conducting pilot training, and a further 20% were undergoing further instruction, like those offered in Canada and in Southern Rhodesia to the Commonwealth trainees, although already qualified.
The rest were assigned to staff positions, since RAF policy dictated that only pilots could make many staff and operational command decisions, even in engineering matters.
At the height of fighting, and despite Churchill's insistence, only 30 pilots were released to the front line from administrative duties.
For these reasons, and the permanent loss of 435 pilots during Battle of France alone with many more wounded, and others lost in Norway, the RAF had fewer experienced pilots at the start of the battle, and it was the lack of trained pilots in the fighting squadrons, rather than the lack of aircraft, that became the greatest concern for Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, Commander of Fighter Command.
Drawing from regular RAF forces and the Auxiliary Air Force and the Volunteer Reserve, the British could muster some 1,103 fighter pilots on 1 July.
Replacement pilots, with little flight training and often no gunnery training, suffered high casualty rates.
The "Luftwaffe" could muster a larger number (1,450) of more experienced fighter pilots.
Drawing from a cadre of Spanish Civil War veterans, they had comprehensive courses in aerial gunnery and instructions in tactics suited for fighter-versus-fighter combat.
Training manuals also discouraged heroism, stressing the utmost importance of attacking only when the odds were in the pilot's favour.
However, German fighter formations did not provide a sufficient reserve of pilots to allow for losses and leave, and the "Luftwaffe" was unable to produce enough pilots to prevent a decline in operational strength as the battle progressed. 
The Newark Co-Pilots were a minor league baseball team based in Newark, New York that played in the New York-Penn League from 1968 to 1979.
They were affiliated with the Seattle Pilots from 1968 to 1969 and with the Milwaukee Brewers from 1970 to 1978.
They were independent in 1979.
Their home ballpark was Colburn Park. 
Throughout his life Orde strongly identified himself as an artist.
In the early 1920s he had a painting studio in Paris.
His entries in phone directories for forty years – 1929 up to his death in 1968 – register him as him ‘Orde, Cuthbert; Artist’.
In his book "Pilots Of Fighter Command: Sixty Four Portraits", Orde wrote an essay explaining the circumstances of his portraits of World War II pilots.
Having been hired to produce illustrations of bomber stations in the summer of 1940, Air Commodore Harald Peake from the Air Ministry saw some of Orde’s drawings was impressed by his portraiture.
It was the height of the Battle of Britain and public attention was focused on the fighter pilots.
Peake asked Orde to make a large number of portraits of them, Orde enthusiastically agreed, and at the start of September set off to work.
It is unclear how many portraits he drew in the year or so with Fighter Command.
Some sources say up to 300, though Orde only lists 160 in his book "Pilots Of Fighter Command".
What is clear is that he only drew a small fraction of The Few.
In no case did I choose the sitter myself.
He was selected either by Group Headquarters or by the station commander and, generally speaking, four or five in each squadron were chosen, the four or five who were considered the most valuable.
So it was for them rather in the nature of a mention in dispatches, I merely being the scribe who wrote out the dispatch.
Taking around two hours per picture, Orde drew men whose names have become familiar to those interested in the history of the Battle; Douglas Bader, Sailor Malan, Robert Stanford Tuck, Johnnie Johnson, Archie McKellar, John Freeborn.
He usually created monochrome pictures of the men using charcoal and white chalk, though some colour portraits were painted, such as that of Bob Stanford Tuck and a second portrait of Sailor Malan.
In drawing the cream of the pilots, names and uniforms soon became out of date as subjects were promoted and decorated.
On finishing his drawing of Hugh Dundas, Orde joked, ‘I've left room for the DFC.
The people I draw always seem to get it’.
Four days later Dundas did.
The daily peril of these men’s lives was apparent.
Orde states that some choices were killed before he had chance to draw them.
Many did not live much longer after their portrait was done.
John Drummond was drawn on 5 October 1940, shortly after landing from what turned out to be his final kill, and is pictured still in his aviator jacket instead of the uniformed outfit Orde commonly depicted.
He died five days later.
However, having flown in combat himself and lost both his brothers in military incidents twenty years earlier, the proximity of death will not have been new to Orde.
Although all the pilots were lauded, Orde was clear that there was an elite among them.I think a squadron of pilots can be divided into three groups: natural leaders and fighters at the top; then the main body of solid talent containing the germ of leaders of the future, chaps whose qualities will develop with experience; and then I suppose the tail, two or three perhaps, who will never be quite good enough to earn distinction but who nevertheless are pulling their weight for all it may be worth.
Despite this, he was adamant that the airmen's extraordinary deeds were the doings of ordinary people.I have often been asked if I have found a definite type of Fighter pilot… I have thought about this a lot, but I feel sure that the answer is ‘No’… The most striking thing about the Fighter pilots – ‘operational Fighter pilots’, grand title that, isn’t it?
– is their ordinariness.
Just ‘You, I, Us and Co.’, ordinary sons of ordinary parents from ordinary homes.
So when you wonder where they come from, dear reader, whoever you may be, contemplate your own home, your profession and your background, and you have the answer.
You have everything in common with them, or at least I hope you have, for they are just people who read the poster that reads ‘It all depends on YOU’.
They are not a race apart.
Orde remained a professional artist, and was still taking commissions for military portraits long after the war, such as one of Air Chief Marshal Sir James Robb in 1958.
He was an inaugural painter-member of the Society of Aviation Artists, formed in 1955.
In 1962 Flight International magazine declared in stilted grammar, ‘Cuthbert Orde, than whom no-one has managed to convey more effectively the character and courage of RAF fighter pilots’.