The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  The public also got its first close look at the prototype Avro 698 bomber, the not-yet-named “Vulcan.” The 698 was a delta-wing long-range bomber well ahead of its time. Test pilot Roland Falk, flying alone, treated spectators to an unusual view of the seventy-five-ton bomber by making vertically-banked turns directly over their heads at two hundred feet. A Time magazine correspondent in the audience overheard a prominent American aircraft manufacturer, sitting amidst his peers, yell what others might have felt: “That pilot ought to be shot! He risked the lives of dozens of the top aviation brains in the free world.”

  Not so quick, boss. That pilot, who stood an enormous bomber on its wing tip and circled at two hundred feet overhead while no doubt laughing his ass off, was just doing his job. Superbly! Without pilots like Roland Falk and John Derry at the stick, fighters and bombers are only shiny paperweights.

  30

  IT’S MY JOB

  AIRSHOW performer Cliff Winters survived the worst ordeal any pilot could ever imagine, truly the stuff of nightmares and too far-fetched even for a 1930s adventure serial.

  During the filming of a stunt for the television action series Ripcord in 1962, Winters’s aircraft collided with another. His ship lost a wing and entered a violent, uncontrollable spiral. Winters grabbed a parachute—that he should have been wearing—from the back of the cabin and jumped out of the aircraft at 4,000 feet. He managed to worm his body into the harness and deploy the chute, which opened at 100 feet.

  The unintentional free-fall was not the only close call Winters survived. In one of his featured airshow stunts, he was strapped first into a straightjacket, then into a parachute. The ripcord was attached to a ball, which Winters clenched in his teeth. On one occasion, he lost his bite on the ball. Thinking quickly, he turned upside down while plummeting toward Earth and let the ball come back to his mouth. Most people would not have survived even one of the events, let alone both. But most people were not Cliff Winters.

  Winters was a veteran of World War Two, not as a pilot but as a barely-of-age paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. After the war, Winters learned to fly on the GI Bill and traveled to South America, where he participated as a pilot in a couple of revolutions. He picked the losing faction in one case and served time in a South American jail. In the late 1940s, evidently tired of revolutions, not to mention Third World jail food, Winters returned to the United States to try his hand as an airshow performer.

  The quiet-spoken, unassuming, and patently nerveless Winters performed in the 1950s and 1960s but his daring would have been right at home in the 1920s and 1930s. To separate his act from that of other performers, Winters did all the standard stunts and then some. He wing walked, transferred airplanes in the air, parachuted, and flew aerobatics. He even allowed a director to set him afire for a movie scene.

  Winters regenerated the sweet science of crashing airplanes into buildings, a more or less routine stunt before the war but largely abandoned afterward. Winters continued the practice into the 1960s at airshows and for television and movies. He once did it just for practice! The buildings were admittedly constructed of cardboard and light wood but there was no denying the terminal damage they inflicted on Fairchild PT-19s and Fairchild PT-26s, the war-surplus trainers that were Winters’s preferred equipment for the task. No one knows how many airplanes Winters destroyed in his short career.

  Winters knew he could not tempt fate forever and predicted as much, although the grim prospect didn’t seem to trouble him. “It’s just a matter of time,” he once told Carol Carson, his girlfriend, sounding much like the stoic pioneer airmen before World War One. “That’s the way I want to go. It’s my job. If I were a street cleaner, I might fall off the truck.”

  The many crashes and close calls Winters survived might have convinced other less-steely performers to seek an alternate form of employment, but Winters hardly seemed to notice. In one stunt, the aircraft crashed through a building, flipped over on its back, climbed a bit, then smashed to the ground. Winters escaped with just a cut on his nose. Walking away from the wreckage, he evaluated the stunt with these words: “That wasn’t even close.” It could have been his motto.

  For the National Air Show in Chino, California, in September 1962, Winters crashed a twin-engine airplane into the ocean near Santa Catalina Island, just to publicize the show.

  A few days later, Winters closed his act at the Chino show with the most spectacular stunt in his repertoire. It consisted of flying under several 13-foot obstacles and through a wall of fire, after which he performed a single snap roll. On that day, for reasons unknown, Winters attempted a second snap roll. He did not finish the second roll. He crashed and was killed. Some eyewitnesses claimed his engine failed, others thought he didn’t have enough speed for the second snap roll.

  Cliff Winters flies through a burning wall prior to executing a low-level snap roll. Author photo.

  The flight was the last stunt of the last act on the last day of the show. Winters was thirty-three years old.

  It’s tempting to think of Cliff Winters as belonging to an earlier time in aviation and group him with the reckless barnstormers, a shoo-in for Squadron of Death or the Thirteen Black Cats membership on the first ballot. But to suggest that Winters was born twenty years too late is to completely miss the point: A pilot and showman of Winters’s skill, daring, and fearlessness would be a sensation in any age.

  31

  OLD SCHOOL

  ON a clear day in 1927, the recently-soloed young U.S. Army Air Corps cadet Paul Mantz spotted the irresistible: A train chugging up a grade. Without a second thought, Mantz executed a split-S to descend and change direction. He aimed directly at the locomotive. The engineer blew his whistle and prepared for the worst.

  Mantz waited until the last instant before pulling up. He might have gotten away with it except that the train was full of military brass. Mantz was asked to leave the Air Corps. How fitting that a career of stunt flying began, quite spontaneously, with a stunt. Mantz, it should be noted, corrected those who called him a “stunt pilot.” He insisted that he was a “precision pilot.” He was, in truth, both.

  Suddenly unemployed, Mantz hoped his brand of flying would impress the film industry more than it had the military. To gain attention, he performed forty-six consecutive outside loops—a record at the time—at the dedication of the San Mateo Airport in 1930. It worked. He had found Hollywood, although some might say Hollywood had found him.

  When the director of the film Air Mail needed someone to fly into the front of a hangar and exit out the back, he could find no one willing to do it. He called the newcomer Mantz, who saw it as a way to get his foot in the door. It worked. His foot stayed in the door for the rest of his life as he built upon a reputation for doing stunts other pilots wouldn’t tackle. Flying through hangars was all in a day’s work for Mantz, as was flying under anything, including the Brooklyn Bridge. What most endeared him to movie directors was his specialty: Crashing airplanes.

  Few pilots could ever claim a career as diverse. Besides movie flying, Mantz flew airshows in the 1930s in a Curtiss P-1 Hawk, did skywriting, competed in coast-to-coast and city-to-city air races, and ran a flight school. From his Los Angeles area airport, Mantz offered discreet, around-the-clock charter service for many Hollywood celebrities in a red Lockheed Vega known as The Honeymoon Express. When Jean Harlow and Hal Rosson quietly eloped in 1933, they flew away in The Honeymoon Express.

  Mantz was Amelia Earhart’s technical advisor and moral support for her around-the-world flight. He flew with Earhart on her first attempt, which ended with a landing in Honolulu that damaged the Lockheed 10. After a long delay, Earhart set out again. Against Mantz’s advice, she left behind a long-range radio to save weight. Had Earhart kept the radio, it may have saved her life and that of her navigator, Fred Noonan. The failed effort haunted Mantz for years.

  Before World War Two, the military distrusted Hollywood for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the film industry’
s knack for giving war movies a pacifist slant. When war came, everything changed. Tinseltown and the warriors put aside any differences and joined forces to beat the Axis. The brass forgave Mantz’s 1927 locomotive buzz job and commissioned him a major in the First Motion Picture Unit. Mantz, the Hollywood stunt pilot who once panicked a locomotive engineer, flew into one end of a hangar and out the other, and specialized in crashing airplanes, made safety films for aviation cadets. Who better?

  No one ever accused Mantz of doing anything in a small way. After the war, while other civilians bought one or two war surplus aircraft at public auction, Mantz bid on an entire fleet parked at a large Oklahoma airport. The inventory is worth recounting, even at this late date, if for no other reason than as proof of how long the United States was prepared and willing to fight.

  Mantz paid $55,000 for 75 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, 228 Consolidated B-24 Liberators, 10 North American B-25 Mitchells, 22 Martin B-26 Marauders, 8 North American P-51 Mustangs, 6 Bell P-39 Airacobras, 90 Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, 31 Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, and another 30 assorted aircraft. The aircraft had cost taxpayers $117,000,000.

  It brings a tear to the eye thinking about it even seventy years later, but Mantz kept only seventy-five aircraft to race and rent to movie companies. He scrapped the rest for a nice profit. The gasoline in the fuel tanks alone paid him back most of the purchase price. The fleet, while it remained intact, became known as the Mantz Air Force. Only a half-dozen air forces in the world owned more aircraft.

  Despite his growing fame as a movie pilot and many successful business ventures, Mantz had a nagging void, an itch, in his aviation life. He would not be satisfied until he had won the transcontinental Bendix Trophy Race for unlimited aircraft, a major part of the Cleveland National Air Races. Before the war, Mantz had entered his outclassed Lockheed Orion in the 1938 and 1939 Bendix races; he lost to famous aviatrix Jackie Cochran in ’38 and Frank Fuller in ’39. Both Cochran and Fuller flew modern Seversky pursuit ships unavailable to Mantz.

  After the war, anyone could purchase a used pursuit ship. More determined than ever, Mantz entered the 1946 Bendix race in a highly-modified P-51 Mustang. He learned that North American Aviation gave Cochran a brand-new P-51 as well as special fuel flow settings for the long trip from Los Angeles to Cleveland, an unfair advantage that was especially maddening to Mantz. But the cagey Mantz was not so easily discouraged or beaten. He obtained the same fuel flow settings and later admitted, “North American gave Jackie Cochran the fuel flow charts. I had to steal mine.”

  Mantz won the Bendix in 1946 and again in 1947 and again in 1948. In 1949, he loaned his P-51 to another pilot who finished in the money but did not win.

  Flying for the movies and later television, became a full-time job for Mantz. He flew in about three hundred films over a thirty-five year career, including God Is My Co-pilot and Twelve O’Clock High. If anyone wonders who owned and sometimes flew Songbird, the Cessna UC-78 “Bamboo Bomber” in the early episodes of the television show Sky King, it was Mantz, not Sky or Penny.

  Mantz was killed July 8, 1965 while filming The Flight of the Phoenix, a movie that stretched the imagination, even by Hollywood standards. For anyone who has not seen the film, it begins when a twin-engine Fairchild C-82 Packet, piloted by Jimmy Stewart, crash-lands in a Libyan desert. The crew and passengers, who have plenty of dates to eat but little water, are all but doomed. One of them, a model airplane designer, convinces the others that a single-engine aircraft could be built from one of the wrecked C-82’s twin tail booms. The project succeeds and the survivors fly away, mere minutes after the water runs out.

  Mantz and his partner Frank Tallman, an equally famous Hollywood stunt pilot, had constructed a flyable aircraft for the movie using an aluminum scratch-built fuselage, Beech 18 outer wings, and a North American AT-6 engine, cowling, and propeller. The ungainly mutant was named the Phoenix. Tallman was slated to fly the aircraft one last time to finish the movie but injured his leg in a freak accident a few days before.

  Mantz offered to take Tallman’s place, even though by that time he had become more comfortable as the man shooting the action in his B-25 Mitchell camera plane, the Smasher. Mantz had little faith in the airworthiness of the Phoenix, but he traveled to Buttercup Valley near Yuma, Arizona, to fly the scene.

  During a low-level camera pass with a stuntman, Billy Rose, in the cockpit and plywood cutouts representing the other survivors, Mantz hit a small hill with the landing gear. The aircraft broke in half and cartwheeled. Mantz was killed instantly. He was sixty-two years old. Rose, sixty-four, survived with severe injuries.

  The National Transportation Safety Board ruled the crash the result of pilot error and impairment of judgment as the result of alcohol. Mantz was unrepentantly Old School; he drank when he flew, as did many pilots of his ilk and era—a time when pilots survived the open-cockpit chapter of aviation protected by nothing more than helmets and goggles, fur-lined leather coats, boots, and gloves and two or three stiff shots of whiskey.

  A tribute at the end of The Flight of the Phoenix recognizes Mantz with the words, “Paul Mantz, a fine man and a brilliant flyer, gave his life in the making of this film.” A film about Paul Mantz may have been far more interesting.

  32

  BULLDOG

  IF a spectator closed his or her eyes and listened, just the sounds coming from Bill Adams’s 450-horsepower Stearman biplane in response to his robust commands were easily worth the price of a ticket.

  Flying precision aerobatics in a 450-horsepower Stearman demands a good deal of ability as well as physical strength. Adams did not lack for either. His Stearman recognized it and yielded to the master. During Adams’s triple vertical snap rolls, all hearts and breathing in the crowd stopped. The various physical forces at work fooled even the smoke, which had trouble following the path of the aircraft. Adams’s outside square loops, snarling and clawing around the sharp turns, were a special treat, and no one who saw Bill Adams perform ever looked at a Stearman in quite the same way again.

  Fellow airshow pilot Duane Cole summed it up best. He compared Adams’s aerobatic style to “a bulldog shaking a rat.” But make no mistake, Adams flew precision aerobatics, not stunts. He certainly knew the difference: “A stunt,” Adams explained, “was something a pilot did to show off while someone on the ground held his beer.” After each show, Adams inspected the aircraft fittings and retightened bolts.

  On July 23, 1966, Adams was performing at an airshow celebrating the opening of a new runway in Valparaiso, Indiana. He made a low inverted pass to cut a ribbon over the runway. Next he began his trademark triple snap roll. During the grueling maneuver, the crankshaft failed at about seven hundred feet. Crankshaft and propeller separated from the engine and cut through the flying wires between the upper and lower wing on the left side. The wings collapsed and the ship fell to the ground, killing Adams. He was forty years old.

  The strain of the consecutive snap rolls had apparently stressed the crankshaft, the weakest link on the engine, to its breaking point. There had been previous failures attributed to high loads placed upon Stearman engine mounts and crankshafts. Lindsay Parsons, renowned aerobatic pilot, lost everything from the firewall forward on his 450 hp Stearman during a lomcevak, an extreme tumbling maneuver. Parsons was able to parachute to safety. Rising aerobatic star Rolly Cole, the twenty-four-year-old son of Duane Cole, was killed in a Stearman in the summer of 1963 while also performing a lomcevak. The stress literally tore the engine from the aircraft. Rolly had time to parachute to safety but nobly remained with the crippled aircraft trying to extricate a passenger, Mel Stickney, trapped in the front cockpit. Stickney was also killed.

  Bill Adams learned to fly after the war and took up crop-dusting, genetically the closest a pilot can get to an airshow performer without actually being on the program. Watching the famous Cole Brothers Airshow one afternoon changed Adams’s life. He gave up crop-dusting, bought a Stearman, and began flying shows. He joined Co
le Brothers in 1952 and became the star performer when Marion Cole retired. Adams left in 1962 to form the Bill Adams Airshow. He was one of the first major airshow stars to court the public, both through media interviews and his availability to spectators. Adams also pioneered corporate sponsorship. He took his act as far as Alaska.

  Adams’s passing in 1966 was something of a turning point in the evolution of airshow aircraft. The Stephens Akro, an entirely new type of seemingly indestructible aerobatic monoplane, first flew the following year. The Akro featured plenty of power, a cantilever wing (lacking external wire bracing), and statically-balanced control surfaces. It was designed and built to do anything in the air and survive the process.

  Leo Loudenslager, one of a new generation of precision aerobatic pilots, demonstrated how to fly the Stephens Akro and gave the airshow world a preview of what the future held. Sadly, Loudenslager did not live to see that future; he died from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident. About the same time, the equally-stout and responsive 180-horsepower Pitts Special S1S biplane arrived. It was a modernized derivative of a Curtiss Pitts design, which had been around since 1944. The Akro and the S1S launched the modern era, even if not everyone noticed at the time.

  The Stearmans, which had toiled uncomplainingly through a world war training pilots and, later, thrilling millions at airshows, would seldom be flown quite as hard again after Bill Adams’s death. Today the big old bipes enjoy a kind of semi-retirement as the preferred platform of wing walkers, who are free to roam about, and wing riders, who are harnessed to a mast, on the large barn-door upper wing. A few active airshow pilots still prefer a Stearman over the many modern understudies available. Stearmans survive because they’re just so much fun to watch, always holding a surprise, something extra for the crowd. They are the aging prima ballerina, a little chubby and slow, but still capable of wowing the house now and then with a faultless Fouettés Pirouette.