The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  A third theory is that the Russian crew, on its own, enabled an experimental control system it had been advised not to use. The control system—never fully explained—was designed to add maneuverability, possibly at the cost of exceeding the TU-144’s structural capabilities.

  There was one more possible permutation to the equation. According to the story, Captain E. Gorynov, another TU-144 test pilot, said he overheard Captain Kozlov speaking to his crew before the disastrous last flight. “If we are going to die, then at least we will die all together.” It’s not known whether Captain Kozlov took a vote of the crew.

  Another TU-144 crashed five years later in an emergency landing during a test flight at Yegoryevsk, a city ninety miles east of Moscow. Overall, the Russian contribution to supersonic passenger flight deserves a nod for effort but, ultimately, the Konkordski proved highly unreliable in scheduled service and suffered from a host of operational problems, not the least of which were excessive fuel consumption and near-unbearable cabin noise. While passengers sitting next to each other had to shout to be heard, those sitting one seat away from each other had to pass notes. The TU-144 made its last commercial flight in 1978.

  British Airways and Air France operated Concordes for twenty-seven years before retiring them in 2003 due to high maintenance costs and lower passenger demand following the crash of an Air France Concorde on takeoff from Paris in 2000. The Paris accident, which may have been caused by debris on the runway, killed 113 persons.

  Many airlines from around the world had signed on to buy the Concorde but eventually all canceled their orders. Meanwhile, jumbo jets sold well. As it turned out, the airlines of the world were far more interested in how many butts they could squeeze into the seats rather than how fast the butts could be relocated from continent to continent.

  The Paris Airshow remains an international stage upon which aircraft manufacturers pitch their newest aircraft to the world’s airlines and the promise of high tech firepower to the world’s military. The former is pure commerce, the latter pure menace. The stakes could not be higher in either case. No airline chairman can afford to miss the show, lest he or she bet the ranch on the wrong fleet of aircraft. And no general or admiral wants to learn too late that a potential foe’s fighter or bomber can perform maneuvers that reduce their own hotshot hardware to target drones.

  The international airshows are the Olympics of aviation but with a crucial difference: there’s only one place on the podium in each event.

  Occasionally, prime-time demonstrations at the international airshows backfire, as in the Konkordski disaster, which guaranteed the Russians would never sell a single copy outside the Soviet Union. Or, as in the case of the Convair B-58 Hustler supersonic bomber, which embarrassed the U.S. Air Force at two Paris Air Shows. The B-58 was already deemed a blunder when one crashed on landing at the 1961 Paris Airshow. A second B-58 crashed at the 1965 Paris Airshow when the pilot, U.S. Air Force Major Elmer E. “Gene” Murphy, attempted a slow roll before returning to the United States. He became disoriented and lost control of the bomber. A total of four men were killed and two injured in the two accidents.

  36

  ELYSIAN FIELD

  THOUGH he is not well known today, few airshow pilots gave promoters or spectators more for their money than Dean Ortner.

  Aircraft multitasking was Ohio country boy Ortner’s specialty. He was a one-man airshow. On most summer weekends in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ortner flew a North American P-51 Mustang or a Chance Vought Corsair, a North American SNJ-5 Texan, as well as a Piper J-3 Cub, all at the same airshow and all on the same day!

  Other pilots would fly the SNJ-5 and Cub to the airshow, typically somewhere in Ohio. Ortner flew the P-51 himself. Merely arriving in a P-51 (later replaced by a Corsair, which he preferred) and making a few high-speed passes would have been enough for the spectators, but it wasn’t enough for Dean Ortner. His perfect loops and hesitation rolls, synchronized to the silky pulse of the P-51’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engine or, later, accompanied by what Japanese soldiers had called the “whistling death” sound of the Corsair, owned the crowd.

  Ortner executed multiple snap rolls in his SNJ-5 at a time when others said it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be done. He had his own version of the “flying farmer” act, in which he would magically appear in the crowd dressed as a farmer with a straw in his mouth and the winning ticket for a Piper J-3 Cub ride in his hand. The fact that Ortner was raised on a farm lent an air of legitimacy to the act.

  Even when Ortner was not performing at an airshow, he found ways to entertain those on the ground. Ortner had a deep appreciation for fun and once left tire marks on a hangar roof during a neighborly visit to a nearby airport.

  As much as Ortner excelled at airshow flying, it was only a pastime, a weekend diversion, something he did for relaxation. His bread and butter was flying freight during the week from the airport on the family farm in Wakeman, Ohio, west of Cleveland.

  By day, the airport appeared to be just another sleepy country strip. At night, it was unlike any other airport, before or since. The Ortner fleet included former pampered airline queens such as the Douglas DC-6 and DC-7, an ex-warhorse Curtiss C-46 Commando, and a few Beechcraft 18s that had done and seen it all. To lovers of old aircraft, the airport had a storybook quality to it, complete with a mechanic named Tom Sawyer.

  Darkness and the pull of the moon awakened the airport and the pilots. Dean, his brother Andy, and the pilots on the Ortner Air Service payroll went to work flying the random fleet at night out of an airport with no instrument approach and a somewhat narrow and crumbly runway. Some experience was required.

  General Motors and the Ford Motor Company relied on operations such as Ortner’s to keep assembly lines open. Rather than shut down a line in, say, Kansas City, due to a shortage of radiators, the plants called outfits like Ortner’s, which delivered the radiators from plant to plant quickly and reliably. Computers have mostly short-stopped the need today for last-minute corrections, but there was a time when the auto companies kept a lot of veteran aircraft in the air and out of the smelter, as well as a lot of night freight-dog pilots working, including this author.

  Dean Ortner was killed June 17, 1973, at an airshow in Shelby, Ohio, when he struck the ground at the bottom of a loop in a borrowed SNJ-5, the navy’s version of the AT-6. Ortner was forty-five years old. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Ortner had misjudged his altitude in the maneuver. Brother Andy Ortner, fifty-one, was killed September 1, 1976, in a Beechcraft 18 crash during a descent into Memphis, Tennessee. The cause was never determined.

  Ortner Airport was central to the worst recreational skydiving accident in United States history. On August 27, 1967, Robert Karns took off in a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber with eighteen Cleveland-area skydivers crammed aboard. Karns planned to drop them over the airport as part of an airshow that day. He flew north over nearby Lake Erie and climbed through a 2,000-foot thick cloud layer before turning south, back to the airport.

  An air traffic controller at Cleveland Air Traffic Control Center, looking on his radar at what he believed to be the B-25, advised Karns he was over the airport. Even though no visible ground contact was possible because of the cloud layer, Karns took the controller at his word and gave the signal to jump. The skydivers left the airplane, not over the airport, but over Lake Erie, five miles from shore. Sixteen of the jumpers drowned. Two others, who landed near pleasure boats, were rescued.

  The Cleveland Center controller had confused the B-25 with another aircraft. Neither aircraft was equipped with a transponder, an identifying device a few years in the future for most civilian aircraft. Jumping through cloud layers was prohibited at the time, as it is today.

  The airport changed hands after the Ortner brothers were gone. It was doing time in limbo when Dean’s son, Steve, a successful businessman, purchased it for nostalgic reasons in 2011 and began making it a working airport again.

  Aircraft on the western arrival
to Cleveland Hopkins Airport cross over the “Wakem” intersection. The fix is more or less directly over Ortner Airport. Pilots looking down will see only a pleasant country airport. Those pilots old enough will remember that it was once a scene of wonder, an Elysian Field full of surplus warplanes and retreaded airliners. Mostly, it was the home of the irreplaceable Dean Ortner, who hauled freight at night during the week in some of his airplanes and flew the others at airshows on the weekend, just to unwind.

  37

  THE SHOW WENT ON

  THE 1975 Reno National Championship Air Races proved fatal for a race pilot and a wing rider in two separate accidents.

  Early in the afternoon of September 12, forty-year-old airline pilot Marland D. Washburn hit the Number One pylon with the left wing of his North American AT-6 Texan at the start of a heat race. The impact sheared the wing and the aircraft dove to the ground, killing Washburn.

  Keeping alive a practice that went back to the earliest days in all sports, air race officials decided to redirect spectator attention from the AT-6 crash by continuing the show. Within twenty minutes of Washburn’s death, aerobatic pilot Joe Hughes was given the okay to take off in his Stearman biplane with wing walker Gordon McCollum in the front cockpit.

  McCollum was a twenty-five-year-old gymnast and school teacher from Costa Mesa, California, who worked as a wing walker and wing rider during summer breaks. McCollum performed spread eagles, handstands, and hung horizontally by his hands on a mast, flapping in the wind like a flag. His routine of free-style stunts was reminiscent of wing walking before World War Two. The team of Hughes and McCollum had helped bring back the appeal of wing walking in the early 1970s.

  To add a touch of theater, McCollum sat in the front cockpit for takeoff and climbed out once in the air. He roamed the wings at will performing his stunts before strapping himself to the mast on the top wing for the finale. Hughes then rolled the Stearman inverted and McCollum, hanging upside down, readied to grab a scarf suspended between two poles.

  With the Reno crowd of about ten thousand still in a state of shock and confusion after watching Washburn’s fatal crash minutes before, Hughes positioned for the pickup. The aircraft dipped a few feet lower than planned and McCollum’s head struck the runway, killing him instantly. The vertical fin and rudder also contacted the ground but Hughes was able to roll the aircraft upright and land.

  Several explanations for the accident circulated around Reno that year and long after. An air race official attributed it to a “freakish downdraft.” The National Transportation Safety Board ruled Hughes had misjudged his altitude. Pilots who witnessed the tragedy pointed to the high density altitude and thin air on that hot day in Reno, a factor that might have compromised the performance of Hughes’s “Super Stearman,” powered by a 600-horsepower engine.

  Hughes believed he was very lucky to have survived the accident. “There’s no way I should have come out of it,” he said about a year later. He said he thought of McCollum as a son and considered ending the act. He didn’t. The Reno air races went on as planned that luckless year and Joe Hughes continued to fly airshows in the Stearman until he retired in 1979. There was never a shortage of applicants for the wing walker job.

  38

  BIG ED

  A regular at New Jersey’s Basking Ridge Airport in the 1960s remembers the day a North American AT-6 Texan made a high-speed pass directly at the hangars. At the last possible moment, the AT-6 pulled straight up. The buzz job might have been a cause for concern at most airports, perhaps even prompting a call to the Federal Aviation Administration from a humorless eyewitness. But no one at the airport gave it a second thought. It was just “Big Ed” Mahler doing his thing.

  Big Ed’s thing was low-level aerobatics, gaudy and hard-charging, a vigorous step above what most of his peers were doing in the mid-1970s. Mahler was something of a throwback, his style closer to the wide-open flying of an earlier time, akin to the prodigious Bill Adams.

  Mahler’s airshow flying also hinted of the coming age of showmanship and corporate sponsorship, begun a decade before by Adams. (Or, more accurately, six decades before by pioneer airman Calbraith Rodgers in his Vin Fiz.) Mahler’s Mennen Special filled the air at uncounted airshows with the inescapable scent of his sponsor’s aftershave lotion, which was mixed with the smoke oil. The bottom of the lower wing on Mahler’s biplane read “Mennen.” The top of the upper wing broadcast, “Thanks, I Needed That,” the company’s well-known slogan. The masculine-scented smoke was difficult to ignore—or forget.

  “Masculine” is the apt word to describe Mahler. He was a big man with strength to match his size, known to hand-prop 600-horsepower radial engines when the electric starters refused to cooperate. At one time in his airshow career, he flew the solo act for a team of Bede BD-5Js, a small jet-powered homebuilt aircraft. The BD-5J’s cramped cockpit was a difficult fit for average-sized pilots, much less the six-foot, four-inch Mahler. Once, when his engine flamed-out during a show, Mahler dead-sticked the little jet onto a Corpus Christi beach where, according to “Big Ed” lore, he peeled away the aluminum fuselage with his bare hands to escape.

  Around 1970 Mahler built a D-295 Special, a large biplane designed in the early 1960s by Nick D’Apuzzo for aerobatic competition that was derived from the Parsons-Jocelyn PJ-260. Mahler built the single-seat D-295 with airshows in mind. His new ship boasted almost three hundred horsepower and a big cockpit that fit him and his style of flying nicely.

  It was difficult to look away when Mahler flew a solo act, but it was impossible not to watch when Mahler and the great Hal Krier flew together, close together, one inverted, one upright, during the years they were with Bill Sweet’s National Air Shows. In the air together, Mahler’s D-295 and Krier’s de Havilland Chipmunk was a competition with no scorekeeper or rules. One blinked at the risk of missing something one might never see again.

  (Harold Krier was killed test-flying a Spinks Akromaster on July 6, 1971 when the aircraft entered a flat spin. After staying with the aircraft as long as possible trying to recover from the spin, Krier bailed out but his parachute malfunctioned. He may also have bailed out at too low an altitude.)

  On September 23, 1977, the forty-three-year-old Mahler performed at the Suffolk Air Fair in Westhampton Beach, New York. While doing aerobatics in his D-295, the steel brace strut under the right horizontal stabilizer failed. Mahler was able to land the aircraft without incident. He inspected the tail section and announced, “It’s no big deal.”

  In an apparent effort to equalize the loads on both sides of the stabilizer, Mahler removed the left bottom stabilizer strut. An hour later he took off to fly more aerobatics and a low-altitude inverted ribbon cutting. At an estimated three hundred feet, the tail separated from the aircraft. The D-295 pitched over and hit nose first on the runway, killing Mahler.

  The D-295, like most modern aerobatic biplanes, was designed with back-up bracing on its flying surfaces. The wings had double flying wires and double landing wires. The tail used double tail brace wires on top of the horizontal stabilizer with a single wire plus the streamlined steel strut on the bottom.

  The history of airshows is the same as the history of everything, a blur of things done right and things done wrong. Those fortunate enough to have seen “Big Ed” Mahler perform prefer to remember not what he might have done wrong, but what he did superbly.

  39

  HEROICS

  IN most cases of a crippled aircraft, the decision to leave is a simple one: Get out if you can. Sometimes, however, the decision becomes a battle of courage over survival, of morality over instinct. A book dedicated to the memory of lost airshow pilots must also include recognition of those performers who chose certain death when things went awry rather than risk the lives of spectators.

  One of the most documented events of such heroism occurred May 9, 1981, at Utah’s Hill Air Force Base. Air force Captain David “Nick” Hauck, a member of the Thunderbirds demonstration team, was performing the “h
i-lo hit and pass to rejoin” maneuver that involved flying through a formation of four aircraft before rejoining it. During the maneuver one of the engines of Hauck’s Northrop T-38 Talon jet caught fire.

  From the ground, ejecting from the burning T-38 seemed to be the logical solution; it’s exactly what the safety officer told the pilot to do. He radioed for Hauck to eject: “You’re on fire! Punch out!”

  But Hauck, aware that he was close to spectators, replied, “Hang on, we have a bunch of people down there.” He coaxed his aircraft, billowing black smoke and in a precarious slow, nose-high descending attitude, for about another half-mile before it struck a tree and a barn and slid across the ground, erupting in flames across a road packed with people. Captain Hauck, thirty-four years old, was killed.

  An Air Force Academy graduate and Vietnam veteran, Hauck had been chosen to fly with the Thunderbirds from a list of more than three thousand applicants. Selection is based on piloting skills and character. And, in Hauck’s case, a quality above and beyond unknown to all until that afternoon in Utah when he made the tough decision between sweet life and sacrifice.

  At the Paris Airshow on June 8, 1989, Russian test pilot Anatoly Kvochur was performing in a Mikoyan MiG-29 Fulcrum twin-engine single-seat fighter when his right engine burst into flames, possibly due to bird ingestion. He was at a low altitude, demonstrating the slow speed capabilities of one of the Soviet Union’s most advanced fighters.

  Even though Kvochur immediately went into afterburner on the left engine, his speed was too slow to maintain controllability. The aircraft entered a steep dive; a crash close to spectators seemed unavoidable. Though he was only a few feet from the ground and had only seconds to react, Kvochur managed to maneuver the MiG-29 over a stretch of open grass near the runway before ejecting. The ejection was successful and Kvochur floated down to within a hundred feet of the fireball. No one was injured.