The Cannibal Queen (37 page)

Still, the Sierras are gorgeous this morning. I can’t think of anywhere else I would rather be.

Safely past the crest, I drop a thousand feet to find slightly warmer air. Soon Yosemite National Park appears before me and I break out the camera. I click photos of the world’s most beautiful valley and bemoan the sun’s position. These would be world-class shots if the sun were setting and throwing the valley in direct, low-angle sunlight and intense shadow. Still I’ll take these. Maybe one will turn out pretty well.

I keep letting down as the terrain allows. Soon the mountains give way to foothills, then the foothills give way to perfectly square and rectangular fields of growing crops. This is the San Joaquin Valley, the highly productive, irrigated market basket of California. A layer of haze in the valley limits visibility to about 20 miles. It is very noticeable after the 50 miles plus of the mountaintops.

I stop in Visalia for fuel, then follow the highway south to Bakersfield, where I turn east for Tehachapi Pass. South of the pass is the coastal range; north of it are the Sierras.

A few hours of flying has brought me to a different world. Here the mountains rise from essentially barren, low-elevation desert. Vegetation increases on the mountain slopes in a direct relationship with elevation—the summits of the mountains actually support pine forests.

Tehachapi Pass is a natural wind funnel. Man has tried to profit from that happy fact. At first I can’t make out what they are, then I realize I am looking at windmills, hundreds of them, all turning in unison. There are easily a thousand of these big, three-bladed windmills, perhaps twice that many. I amuse myself by counting blades and decide they turn at about 50 RPM.

The Mohave Desert lies on the eastern side of Tehachapi Pass. The desert is yellowish-brown and looks barren from 7,500 feet. It stretches away pool-table flat until it disappears into the haze. Approaching Palmdale I can easily distinguish Edwards Air Force Base and the runway where the space shuttle lands. Beyond the base is Rogers Lake, a vast salt flat. To the south are the San Gabriel Mountains.

Looking at Edwards and the Mohave, I immediately think of Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the “sound barrier.” Such is the power of a great writer. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe made Yeager a larger-than-life figure. Before Wolfe, Yeager was a retired Air Force brigadier general who had once enjoyed a sliver of public notice. After Wolfe, Chuck Yeager was the ultimate American hero, the determined, straight-arrow man of humble origin with no education who transformed himself into the world’s greatest pilot by strength of will and sterling character. Wolfe ran wild with the hero dust, and such was the magnitude of his talent, he mythologized Yeager.

That base over there by the salt flat is where the great Odysseus Yeager, a kingly man beloved of the gods, strapped a bullet-shaped rocket-plane to his ass one day in 1947 and fulfilled his destiny.

Just flying in the same valley where the man-god did it gives me goose bumps.

I am enviously meditating on Tom Wolfe’s talent when the bottom drops out. The
Queen
drops sharply enough that my derriere parts company with the rear seat for a heartbeat, just long enough for the adrenal glands to squirt a quart of the go-juice into my system. I get a firm grip with my left hand on a steel fuselage member. It’s silly, I know, but it makes me feel better when the next jolt comes half a minute later.

These turbulence speedbumps that leave you weightless for an instant—they make me wish the
Queen
had a canopy. That feeling that you and the plane are parting company has a visceral impact on me, made all the worse by my experience in Australia in a Tiger Moth on my very first open-cockpit airplane ride. We weren’t wearing parachutes. Without warning my pilot in the rear seat, a New Zealander, rolled the airplane upside down and put negative G on, which predictably catapulted me toward mother earth. Of course my progress downward was arrested by my shoulder harness and lap belt.

Still, I almost wet my pants. I jammed my knees sideways and grabbed. There I was, 2,000 feet over Australia with nothing between me and my creator but a harness with one buckle that I hadn’t preflighted.

When my benefactor rolled the plane upright, I found that the throttle quadrant had a screw sticking out of it about half an inch. I noticed it because the screw was buried in the side of my left knee. I still have the scar.

Forty miles southeast of Palmdale is El Cajon Pass, the entrance to the Los Angeles basin. The pass is low, about 4,200 feet, so the
Queen
sails through at 7,500 with only a few wicked bounces. A thicker smog layer coats the L.A. basin. It looks like smoke and the upper limit has a definite edge. Visibility in the thick stuff is about six miles.

Approach calls traffic right, left, above, below, but I spot only one other plane, an airliner. Welcome to the big city, you bumpkin.

Ontario Approach vectors me right across their field at 3,500 feet. Just when I wonder if they’ve moved Chino Airport, I see it.

As I taxi in, a P-51 Mustang dressed for a Saturday night date taxis by on the way to the runway. A better-than-new B-24 is surrounded by a retinue on the ramp; an A-1 awaiting restoration sits rotting behind a hangar.

This is the place!

The Exxon dealer is a guy named Dave Lewis, who let me tie the
Queen
beside his building and borrow his Toyota pickup. The next morning I strolled along the parking mat taking photos.

Chino is warbird heaven. Here former military fighters, bombers and trainers are expertly and lovingly restored, painted, polished and flown. Small hangars belonging to outfits like Aero Traders and the Military Aircraft Restoration Company are chock full of these machines—they even stick out the open doors because there’s no room for them inside.

Swarms of airframe and engine experts bustle about doing mechanical things, peering here, prodding there, talking to each other in the lingo of the aeronautically initiated. I won’t reproduce any of it here because you wouldn’t understand a word. I didn’t.

Peering into the gloom of the hangars from the bright sunlight of the ramp, one sees all manner of gleaming, shining masterpieces: a MiG-19 under restoration, a T-28 dolled out with a Navy gray and off-white paint scheme, several P-51s, Corsairs, Hellcats, T-6s, a T-2 Buckeye, you name it.

On the ramp beside a pristine B-24 complete with fake guns is a C-1 Trader wearing the colors and markings of USS Lexington. This may be Lexington’s former carrier on-board delivery (COD) plane, but it never looked this good while flying for Uncle Sugar.

In silent awe I walked down the ramp to the Planes of Fame Museum, there to be overwhelmed. On the grass outside is a B-17 Flying Fortress, Piccadilly
Lilly
, the first aircraft to fly nonstop around the world.

They want $7.95 to let you inside the museum hangars. Pay it. It’s worth every cent.

Hangar #1 houses the heavy iron, a couple of P-51 Mustangs, single examples of an F6F Hellcat, P-47 Thunderbolt, TBM-3 Avenger, P-40 Warhawk, SBD-5 Dauntless, and F8F Bearcat, among others. These are big airplanes. The Thunderbolt was called “the Jug” by its pilots, and looking at it one can see why. Did you know the Hellcat had fabric-covered elevators, rudder and ailerons?

Among the planes that caught my fancy in Hangar #2 was a Japanese A6M5 Zero, the only Zero in the world still flying with the original engine and prop. After capture in Saipan in 1944, it was brought back to the U.S. and wrung out by test pilots, among them Charles Lindbergh. Restored in 1978, it toured Japan, the only Zero to fly in Japanese airspace since World War II.

Here also you will find not one but two Messerschmitt BF 109s, both originals. One is a Spanish-built version with a Rolls-Royce Merlin upright V-12 engine, but the other is the real McCoy, with an inverted V-12, 1,475-HP Daimler-Benz. According to the museum catalog there are only four of these German-built 109s in the United States.

I grew up reading tales of these fighters, and here are two of them! Yet they’re so small! The Germans wanted fighters with maneuverability optimized, yet the American fighters of that era had to fly tremendous distances, which meant large quantities of fuel, so they were of necessity much larger aircraft. The Americans were also fond of heavy armament, so the requirement to house six or eight 50-caliber machine guns and their ammo was also a major factor in the design process.

Hangar #2 houses two great American fighters from the ’30s, a Boeing F4B-3 biplane and a P-26 Peashooter. This is the only Peashooter I have ever laid eyes on. Also here is a Bristol fighter from World War I, generally acknowledged as the best fighter of that war. But the pièce de résistance is the personal fighter of Charles Nungesser, a Hanriot HD-1 scout wearing its original 130-HP Clerget rotary engine. Nungesser shot down 45 German airplanes and survived World War I only to be killed with Raymond Coli in 1927 when the two of them tried to fly the Atlantic from west to east to win the Orteg Prize.

The Hanriot is unrestored and hangs from a dimly lit ceiling. Here is a plane that needs plenty of floorspace, a spotlight or two, and a tastefully arranged velvet rope to restrain the overly enthusiastic. She also needs new fabric. There are a thousand uses for duct tape, but patching holes in the fabric of priceless airplanes should not be one of them.

The jet hangar is a block down the street. A nice collection of Air Force hot stuff is parked outside. Inside you will find a MiG-15 and MiG-17, an F-11 Tiger that once flew with the Blue Angels, an F-104 Starfighter, a couple of F-86 Sabres, and the one that I would steal if I had keys to the place, an F-8 Crusader. She carried four 20-mm cannon and was known as “the last of the gunfighters.” Crusader pilots were also partial to bumper stickers that proudly proclaimed, “When you’re out of F-8s, you’re out of fighters.”

No interceptor, the supersonic F-8 was designed before air-to-air missiles became reliably operational. It was a dogfighter all the way. A Crusader pilot had to outmaneuver and outfly his opponent until he closed to gun range, which as any real fighter pilot will tell you, is as close as humanly possible.

How close is humanly possible? “I opened fire only when the whole windshield was black with the enemy,” said the Luftwaffe’s Erich Hartman, the most successful fighter pilot who ever lived.

By the mid-sixties F-8s were also armed with heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles, but there were no hundred-mile missile shots for those guys.

Air-to-air combat as a joust of aerial knights reached its zenith with F-8s, the last U.S. Navy fighter without a computer or sophisticated radar. One man strapped himself into the airplane, took the catapult shot, and went to find the enemy with his eyes. When he found him, he attacked. A gun battle followed, one that Manfred von Richthofen, Charles Nungesser and the other aces of old would have understood. You didn’t “shoot down” your enemy or launch a million-dollar missile that would do the dirty deed for you—you outflew him and closed to hammer him with your guns. You killed him. Then you flew home to live with it.

To win one of these highly personal aerial duels to the death required a warrior’s heart. You could be the world’s greatest pilot and that wouldn’t be enough. Somewhere in your psyche there had to be the willingness, the desire, to get in close and kill. Nintendo didn’t invent this—you had to have this streak of the savage or you were the hunted, not the hunter.

F-8 pilots were the keepers of the holy flame during the early dark years of the Vietnam War when they alone enjoyed a very favorable kill ratio against MiGs. The founding fathers of the Navy’s Top Gun School were all F-8 pilots.

This blood lust is still essential for a fighter pilot, even if he or she is flying one of today’s push-button missile-launching platforms. Does this apple-cheeked high-tech computer whiz have enough savage left when the veneers of civilization are ripped away and he is naked in the sky in a kill-or-be-killed situation? If he doesn’t kill quickly enough and well, he will be killed. It’s that simple.

After snarfing a gut-bomb at Flo’s Airport Cafe, I wandered back to the FBO to say good-bye to Dave Lewis. As I walked toward the building a Navy-blue F4U gull-wing Corsair taxied in. The throaty rumble of that 2,100-HP radial engine touched something inside me that no torch singer ever reached.

“There’s always something new and different happening here,” Lewis told me. “History taxis by my window every day. And you never know what will go by next.

“The restorers are the key to Chino. Guys like Bruce Goessling, who went to Red China and thirty-nine days later came back with a batch of MiG-15s that still had the machine guns installed. And David Tallichet, who reportedly owns over three hundred airplanes. He’s almost finished with a magnificent restoration of a B-26 that crashed in Alaska on a ferry flight. Guys like Charles Nichols, who cornered the world market on N3N wings when he drove by a salvage yard one day and saw them stacked up. He walked in and bought them all. Just couldn’t bear the thought of those wings going in the smelter.”

I asked him if these people ever sell their treasures.

Lewis laughed. “Goessling sold the MiGs. But most of them never sell anything. Oh, they’ll trade you if you have something they want, but they don’t sell airplanes.”

We talked about the Planes of Fame Museum. “It’s a flying museum. They fly about everything except the Hanriot. Steve Hinton flew their A-1 Skyraider when Paramount filmed your book,
Flight of the Intruder
. The museum used to give an airshow every year here at Chino, got all those planes out and flew them. That stopped about three years ago. The TCAs and ARSAs are growing like weeds in the L.A. basin. It’s getting harder and harder to fly here.

“But we have a new airport manager, a retired Marine, and he knows a thing or two about airshows. He’s working on one for next year, getting people to help. It’s going to be a great one. I think Hartley Folstad is going to do his Stearman show.”

Lewis rooted through the pile on his desk for a moment and found a brochure. A 25,000-hour former Navy pilot who now flies for United, Hartley Folstad has formed a company known as the Stearman Flight Center with headquarters at Chino. The company has five Stearmans, three with Pratt & Whitney 450s and two with Continental 220s. The company is in the airshow business, putting on aerial acts with the big-engined Stearmans and giving rides with the others. Folstad has personally restored seven Stearmans. I gotta meet this guy!