The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  Adams and his Stearman were not part of an era. They were an era. Adams once modestly described his routine as “a lot of smoke and noise,” but he was only two-thirds correct. Adams’s routine certainly showcased smoke and noise but it also possessed beauty, raw and unruly to be sure, but all the more pure because of it. His price for a show was about the highest in the business but he always stayed booked: Some things are just worth it.

  The great Bill Adams poses in front of his 450 hp Stearman. Courtesy of Bill Adams, Jr.

  33

  HOW TO FLY

  DICK Schram, a.k.a. “The Flying Professor,” did not invent the airshow clown act, but he owned the patent. Nor was Schram the first or the last “Flying Professor,” but he was the one who taught the class. Schram was a beloved airshow mainstay for two decades before he was killed in a freak accident while performing on June 4, 1969 in Reading, Pennsylvania.

  Schram developed his act after World War Two. He dressed in a professorial silk top hat and tails and carried an absurdly large book entitled How to Fly. The airshow announcer would tell the people that Captain Richard Schram, U.S. Naval Reserve—which he was—would arrive any minute to put on a show for them.

  As the crowd searched the horizon, Schram climbed into a Piper J-3 Cub that had been left unattended, its engine idling. He’d take off but always seemed to forget his How to Fly book. The stage was thus set and the curtain raised for a twenty-minute flying lesson, during which the Flying Professor would demonstrate to the crowd how not to fly—unless, of course, one knew how not to fly as well as he.

  Schram typically flew stock Piper J-3 Cubs, available at most little airports in the 1950s and 1960s. He’d rent one, fly the stuffing out of it over the weekend at the local airshow, and return it on Monday, having voided any remaining warranty.

  Although there was nothing special about the Cubs Schram rented, Schram was one of a kind. He got more out of a Cub than was in it. He looped and rolled off the deck; he did hammerhead stalls and spun the Cub from low altitude. Schram was known to disappear behind a hangar row or tree line and magically reappear somewhere else, sneaking up on the crowd from behind. His landings were a special treat. After killing the engine, the Flying Professor would do a half-roll and finish with a half loop to a landing, sometimes assisted by a drag chute. The Cub would stop in its tracks and the flying lesson was over. Most knew it had been an act, but that didn’t seem to detract from the enjoyment.

  Leaflet for spectators describing The Flying Professor’s flight routine. Courtesy of Brewster Bray.

  Schram’s act was a continuation of a routine introduced before World War One by the pioneer Lincoln Beachey. The demonstrations, known as “clown acts,” became very popular at air circuses during the barnstorming period of the 1920s. A pilot named “Wild Bill” Kopia put on one of the best. Kopia dressed up and pretended to be a famous female opera star who had bought a ticket for a ride. As “she” sat in a Curtiss Jenny with the engine idling and waiting for the pilot to arrive, the show announcer made a big deal about what a great honor it was to have such a celebrity going on her first airplane ride. “Right here, today, folks! Right before your eyes!”

  As the announcer carried on, the diva waved at the crowd and, seemingly by accident, advanced the throttle full forward. The Jenny began to creep, then speed, then turn directly toward the spectators, who screamed and scattered. Kopia got as close as he dared before ground-looping the aircraft to turn it away from the crowd. He’d take off and the real fun began. If only it had been filmed.

  Clown acts were not always solo. The “Three Beer Mugs,” featuring not one but three 37-horsepower Aeronca C-3 “flying bathtubs” held in loose formation with the help of ropes, was a popular attraction in the 1940s and 1950s. The act should not be confused with the pre-World War Two U.S. Army Air Corp formation team called “The Three Mugs of Beer.” Yes, the U.S. military once had a sense of humor.

  Modern variations of the clown act include a hick in overalls usually named “Homer,” or a drunk, or even an actual clown, who wins a ride in a rigged raffle. A ten- to twenty-minute flight with the ending in doubt, at least in the minds of some spectators, follows. Corny and timeworn it may be, but the clown or “flying farmer” act is a guaranteed crowd pleaser, a staple to this day. Needless to say, aiming the aircraft at the crowd is no longer encouraged. Nor is pretending the helpless “passenger” is female, a practice that all but ended when women aerobatic pilots began wowing the crowds as much as the men in the 1930s.

  The trick for the clown act pilot is to fly inelegantly but precisely. Lesser performers do a series of one-wheel touch-and-goes, skids around flat turns, steep pull-ups, and low swoops over the runway. The better performers try to emulate “the Flying Professor” but seldom succeed.

  When the first Piper J-3 Cub flew in 1938, no one could have suspected that it would become not only a classic but also an airshow mainstay, both in its stock and clipped-wing versions. As much as airport operators and student pilots abused them, it’s a wonder that any Cubs survived at all. The Cub simply does not possess the physical attributes of greatness. Its uninspired wings are abnormally, even clumsily large for its scrawny fuselage. The landing gear is too wide and too low. Cubs squat! The engine’s odd, exposed baffling gives the airplane the appearance of a hooded, four-eyed insect. Who would have ever guessed anything born so homely would someday be so beautiful?

  Almost twenty thousand Cubs were built from 1938 to 1947. They were a near-perfect pilot trainer. It’s not widely known, but most American pilots in World War Two had to first prove they could fly a Piper Cub before moving on to the bigger—not to mention much more expensive—military iron.

  The Cub that killed “The Flying Professor” was not his own. As was Schram’s custom, it was either rented or borrowed. The fatal accident occurred following a hammerhead stall. Schram pointed the nose down to recover from the stall, something he had done a thousand times. But instead of pulling out of the dive, the Cub flew straight into the ground. His son was announcing the show at the time.

  In its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the control stick, which is attached with a single bolt, came loose from its mount. The board blamed the fatal crash on inadequate pre-flight inspection.

  Flying an airplane smoothly is challenging enough but doing so while the crowd believes the aircraft is out of control and in imminent danger of crashing takes talent and more than a little nerve. Dick Schram brought a delicate balance of slapstick and elegance to the airshow circuit. Spectators laughed. Pilots marveled.

  34

  BEVO

  AIRCRAFT earn space in museums for a variety of reasons. Some conquer oceans or continents, win races or wars, set records, or simply grow so old that they can’t be denied admission. Some are instantaneously recognizable, while others need a bit of explanation.

  Today, a red and white Bücker Jungmeister, a training biplane built in Germany for the Luftwaffe before World War Two, hangs from the ceiling of a prominent museum. It’s a worthy, well-earned retirement after a celebrated life in the company of Beverly “Bevo” Howard, a name that was synonymous with “airshow” to several generations.

  It goes without saying that every airshow pilot is exceptional, since just being good enough might carry a wannabe through a weekend or two but not year after year. Consistency is king, and Howard was known for it. His specialty was the inverted-ribbon pickup, which Howard had done about fifteen hundred times before an estimated thirty million spectators with no problem until October 29, 1971, when he was killed performing the maneuver at a show for charity at Greenville, North Carolina.

  Bob Russell, an airshow pilot and close friend of Howard’s, also planned on performing the inverted pickup that day in his de Havilland Chipmunk, a Canadian military training aircraft. He witnessed Howard’s crash and described it in his biography, Touching the Face of God, a book dedicated to Howard.

  Russell recalls gusty winds as we
ll as a strong tailwind that would be at their back on the ribbon pickup. Bevo offered Russell advice beforehand: “Bob, keep the plane low—and roll farther out. Away from the runway, so you’ll have more time to correct for altitude and line up with the edge of the runway.”

  Before Howard performed the ribbon pickup, he usually flew inverted down the runway about fifteen feet above the ground, his hands dangling out of the cockpit, flying the Jungmeister with his knees. Howard was executing a 180-degree turn to fly back to the end of the runway to get into position for the inverted pickup when the accident occurred. In Russell’s words:

  Then I saw it happen right before my eyes: About halfway around the 180 degree turn, the lower left wing flew off Bevo’s airplane. As it did, the flying wires pulled the upper left wing off. Bevo was in a knife-edge turn when this happened and there was no way he could right the plane. As I watched, horror stricken, the plane went out of control and plummeted to the ground on its left side, like a dying bird.

  Russell ran to the scene to find that his dear friend and boyhood idol Bevo Howard had been killed in the crash. At first, Russell thought the Jungmeister suffered structural failure but soon realized that the airplane had collided with a tree, a tall poplar that had lost its leaves and may have been difficult to see. Some reports, including that of the National Transportation Safety Board, claim engine failure due to fuel starvation contributed to the accident. The NTSB based its findings on the fact that there was no fire and the fuel tank was empty, though it didn’t allow for the possibility that fuel may have drained out of the upside down aircraft after the accident. In his book, Russell, who abandoned the inverted-ribbon pickup after Howard’s death, once again echoed the stoicism of the early exhibition pilots:

  … the odds were high that at some time or another in the career of an aerobatics pilot like Bevo, he would have close brushes with injury or death… We all knew the risks, and we realized that when our number was up, it was up. There was nothing to be done about it….His luck ran out on that hazy autumn day at Greenville, North Carolina.

  Howard, who often advised other airshow pilots to “always keep an ‘out’ in your hip pocket,” found himself in a situation where an “out” would not have helped. Perhaps more than any other fatality in the history of airshows, Bevo Howard’s death proved that even a pilot with impeccable flying skills, a dedication to safety, and a lifetime of experience is not out of reach of the forces that blindly roll the dice for all.

  Howard began his airshow career in 1933 at the age of nineteen. Until his death, he was one of the featured performers in every major airshow and air race for four decades. He lived three lives in parallel with his airshow career: He was a pilot for Eastern Airlines at the age of twenty-one, he won numerous national and international aerobatic competitions, he ran flight schools that trained thousands of allied pilots during the war, and later trained thousands more for thirty-two countries.

  Howard was something of a contradiction. He was not known to take unnecessary risks, yet was the first pilot to do an outside loop in a Piper J-3 Cub, a negative G maneuver that everyone assured him would tear the wings off, which might have been true if the pilot had not been Bevo Howard.

  Howard’s Jungmeister—the same type aircraft that trained Germany’s Luftwaffe pilots before and during World War Two—lived a life as interesting as his own. The famed Romanian aerobatic pilot Alex Papana brought it to the United States from Germany in 1936 on the Hindenburg. (Luckily, he took an earlier flight than the one that lit up the newsreels.)

  Papana competed in and demonstrated the Jungmeister until it was damaged in 1940, when it was sold to aerobatic pilot Mike Murphy. Howard acquired it from Murphy after the war. The little bipe, with only a twenty-one-foot wingspan, had found a home it would never leave. Today Howard’s restored Jungmeister, sporting its red and white checkerboard and sunburst paint, hangs upside down from the ceiling of the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, exactly as Bevo Howard would have wanted, and exactly as thousands of his fans remember it.

  At the time of his death at age fifty-seven, Howard ran a half-dozen successful businesses. He did not need the money from airshow work. In fact, the show he flew on the day he was killed was for charity. Lesser mortals may wonder why Howard bet his life several times every weekend during the show season with a grueling fifteen-minute, forty-maneuver routine. Even if Howard could have articulated the reasons, most people would not be able to understand. Obsession and commitment at such a level is a language spoken only by a few.

  While Bevo Howard may have been the most famous airshow pilot to perform the inverted-ribbon pickup, he was not the first. The distinction belongs to Vincent “Squeak” Burnett, an airshow pilot that introduced the stunt in the 1930s. Burnett was known to drag his vertical fin through the weeds while flying inverted past the spectators. He is also credited with the first outside square loop.

  35

  KONKORDSKI

  AT the 1973 Paris Air Show, the Russians billed the Tupolev TU-144 as the world’s first supersonic airliner, the latest Soviet technological triumph and a validation of the superiority of the communist system. At least that’s how the Russians saw it. Everyone else took one look and tagged it the “Konkordski,” due to its similarity to the British-French Concorde, which also debuted at the show.

  The Russians took exception to the nickname, pointing out that the TU-144 made its first flight several months before the Concorde. But “Konkordski” stuck, mostly due to the Soviet reputation for brazen industrial espionage. Many at the Paris show may have recalled the Tupolev TU-4, an exact copy of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, which the Tupolev company built by reverse-engineering a U.S. Army Air Force B-29 that had fallen into Soviet hands at the end of World War Two. In fairness to the Russians, however, building a long-range bomber was good planning. After all, stealing the plans for the atomic bomb would have been wasted effort without an aircraft capable of delivering it somewhere far away.

  Mikhail Kozlov, captain of the Konkordski, might have been reacting to the nickname when he boasted to reporters, “Just wait until you see us fly. Then you’ll see something!” Kozlov’s confidence was no doubt boosted as he watched the Concorde do its stuff, which included a steep but unexciting climb after a high-speed low pass. To its credit, the Concorde crew practiced restraint while flying a two hundred ton supersonic passenger aircraft at low altitude in front of 250 thousand spectators.

  Next up were the Soviets. Captain Kozlov rolled along the runway and rotated the Konkordski smoothly into the air. After a high-speed pass before the crowd, Kozlov climbed much more steeply than the Concorde. It was an impressive start to the show he had promised until, at about two thousand feet, the Konkordski appeared to stall. It then pitched sharply downward, both engines at full power. When Kozlov attempted to recover from the dive, the aircraft came apart, killing all six people on board as well as eight on the ground, including several children. Another sixty were injured by falling debris. Fifteen homes were destroyed.

  The TU-144 was an important aircraft at an important airshow. Investigators took a long time and studied several theories, one more startling than the last. Since it involved a Russian aircraft during the time of the Soviet Union, there was no shortage of intrigue. Stories circulated that the British-French consortium that built the Concorde had passed a set of flawed plans to a Russian spy. Incredibly, the Russians suggested they had been duped by plans they stole!

  Anecdotal evidence backs the story. In a 1996 documentary produced for the British television series Secret History, a member of the Concorde team admitted to passing on spurious information, including a phony compound—essentially black chewing gum—to a Russian spy who desired a scraping of the runway tire marks left by the Concorde on landing during tests of a new and highly-secret rubber.

  The Russians also cried interference from a French Dassault Mirage jet fighter that was in the air the same time as the TU-144. The Russians insisted the Mirage was flying
on a covert mission to take photographs of the Konkordski’s advanced canards, which are elevators mounted on the nose of the ship to give better control and stability at slow speed. (The Concorde did not require the canards, due to its more advanced wing design, which was apparently left out of the pinched plans.) Whatever other purpose they served, the canards gave the Konkordski the look of having grown a Cossack mustache.

  The Russians contended that the Mirage pilot, in his efforts to take furtive photos of the canards, had distracted the Konkordski captain, who maneuvered too briskly to avoid hitting the fighter, causing added airframe stress and the resultant structural failure. Perhaps only by coincidence, but canard technology reminiscent of the TU-144 appeared a few years later on various European and British jet fighters, including the successful multirole Eurofighter Typhoon.

  Tupolev Tu-144, as seen at 1973 Paris Air Show. Note extended canards. Courtesy of RuthAS, Creative Commons.

  The 1973 Paris Airshow rules prohibited other aircraft from being in the air when a demonstration aircraft was flying. The Mirage was indeed in the air, both for the flight of the Concorde and of the Konkordski. The Concorde crew had been told of the Mirage’s presence but the crew of the Konkordski had allegedly not been advised.