The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  Unlike the high-powered, fast, and sprightly aerobatic ships that would replace the CAP-10Bs, the Héligoins’ flying calmed, rather than assaulted, the senses. When Daniel and Montaine performed, their skill and evident great trust in each other gave an added dimension to the show. But their flying was best appreciated when one surrendered to the romantic notion that their closeness in the air went far beyond trust to intimacy.

  54

  VINTAGE WINE

  AIRSHOW accident rates worldwide had been declining dramatically for the past couple decades when the Biggin Hill International Air Fair opened on Saturday, June 2, 2001. Biggin Hill’s record had been exemplary, with no accidents since 1980, the year Don Bullock and his passengers were killed when he attempted a roll after takeoff in his Douglas A-26 Invader, the Sally B.

  Fatal accidents on both days of the 2001 show ended Biggin Hill’s long record of safety. On the first day, under a layer of broken clouds, two vintage de Havilland jets, a 1945 Vampire and a 1951 Sea Vixen, took off separately, joined up, and flew in formation before the crowd, the Vampire in right echelon. The team performed a left turn during which the Vampire lined up behind the Sea Vixen. Flying away from the spectators, the Sea Vixen executed a right wing-over, followed by the Vampire. As the Vampire rolled to the right, it went inverted and its nose dropped. The pilot managed to get the descending Vampire upright but it continued to descend until striking the ground, killing pilot Sir Kenneth Hayr and his watch pilot, Jonathan Kerr.

  It appeared that the Air Fair would be canceled. But the families of the Vampire pilots, whose decision would have been honored had they opted for cancellation, consented to allow the show to continue.

  The weather was much improved Sunday and the mood upbeat, despite Saturday’s tragedy. The clearing skies were filled with everything from a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress escorted by two North American P-51 Mustangs, a Grumman F6F Hellcat, a Grumman F7F Tigercat, and the odd pairing of a Beech 18 trying to keep up with a North American B-25 Mitchell bomber.

  An act consisting of a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, a Douglas AD-4 Skyraider, and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra took off in the afternoon. The P-63, flown by Guy Bancroft-Wilson, was to provide vertical maneuvers to fill in while the other two aircraft made passes in front of the crowd.

  The day before, because of the cloud layer, Bancroft-Wilson’s Kingcobra performance consisted only of low passes but, with the improved weather on Sunday, he performed a loop. Although the loop was completed successfully, eyewitnesses said the backside appeared unsteady. A little later in the routine, the Kingcobra entered a rolling climb. At the top of the climb, with the aircraft nearly inverted, Bancroft-Wilson appeared to lose control but recovered. He entered a wingover to the left before flying a short distance away from the show. He returned and began another loop. At the top of the loop the Kingcobra lost airspeed and stopped flying. It rolled upright and fell from the sky in a steep, nose-first attitude, exploding on impact with the ground. Bancroft-Wilson was killed.

  London’s Biggin Hill Airfield is one of the most famous airfields in England. Royal Air Force fighter squadrons flying out of Biggin Hill defended London and Southeast England during the dark days of the Battle of Britian. Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes from Biggin Hill shot down fourteen hundred German aircraft during the battle that changed not only the course of the war but of the world. Biggin Hill was also home to “Operation Crossbow,” England’s defense against the V-1 flying bombs.

  Given Biggin Hill’s past, it’s not surprising that it hosted dozens of vintage fighters and bombers during the 2001 Air Fair, which also observed the sixtieth anniversary of America’s entry into the war. There were almost two dozen airshow acts on the bill. Attendance was estimated at eighty thousand spectators.

  Each year irreplaceable vintage military aircraft are lost in crashes, many at airshows and many with loss of life. Typically, the crashes are a result of aircraft performing in circumstances never intended by the designers. All military fighters were certainly built for aerobatics; extreme maneuverability was necessary to avoid being killed in a dogfight. But dogfights were almost always fought high in the sky, where there was room for energy management, a matter of trading altitude for speed when necessary. When altitude and speed are missing at low altitude, the flight can end suddenly.

  Some airshow pilots successfully flew fighter aircraft in airshows for a long time and lived to sign books in their old age. But they just might be the exceptions that prove the rule. Bob Hoover thrilled millions for years with his P-51 Mustang, Ole Yeller. His performance juggled airspeed and energy seamlessly. He avoided having to hog his way out of bad situations with power by avoiding bad situations.

  A quick review of Hoover’s résumé is worth the time for would-be imitators. In World War Two, Hoover escaped from a German POW camp for captured Allied pilots by stealing a Messerschmitt FW-190. Hoover was Chuck Yeager’s first choice for backup pilot in the Bell X-1 program. And no less a judge of flying expertise than Jimmy Doolittle once called Bob Hoover “the greatest stick-and-rudder man who ever lived.” Jimmy Doolittle!

  In 1997, one of the last flyable Messerschmitt ME-109 fighters crashed in Cambridgeshire, England. The pilot survived. In 1996, a rare flyable de Havilland Mosquito bomber and its pilot were lost at a show in Manchester, England. One day after the twin tragedies at Biggin Hill in 2001, a Spitfire was destroyed and the pilot killed at a show in Rouen, France.

  Some argue that the hallowed birds of war should more properly be on permanent non-flying museum display, where they would be safe from everything except dust and where they could be patted on the head now and then like an old faithful pet. If the day ever comes when there remains only a single flyable war relic in the world, some will fight to protect it while others will fight to fly it, comparing it to a rare bottle of wine and insisting that it’s not worth a damn unless used.

  55

  THE RECORD

  ON July 27, 2002, a Ukrainian Air Force Sukhoi Su-27 fighter crashed at an airshow at Sknyliv Airfield in western Ukraine. The two pilots ejected safely but many spectators were not as fortunate. Eighty-five were killed and five hundred more injured. Because humans keep score on everything, the event is remembered for exactly what it is: The deadliest airshow in history.

  As modern airshows go, Sknyliv was not large. Only ten thousand spectators turned out to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Ukrainian Air Force’s 14th Air Corps, an event that would never have drawn the world’s attention under ordinary circumstances. Had the show come off without a problem, it would have been forgotten and joined the hundreds of thousands of successful airshows around the world, memorable only for what did not happen.

  The Sknyliv audience, full of national pride and awe, watched the Su-27, one of the most advanced jet fighters ever built, enter a high-speed rolling dive, a maneuver sometimes called a “Vertical Charlie.” From eyewitness accounts, the pilot stopped the roll and pulled out of the dive but failed to arrest his rate of descent. He tried to save the situation and stayed with the aircraft until a wing literally touched the ground. At that point he and the co-pilot ejected and floated down safely not far from the crash site.

  The now pilotless Su-27 was quite another matter. The burning, demolished remains of what had been almost seventeen tons of high-tech hardware skidded toward parked aircraft, glanced off the nose of a large Ilyushin Il-76 transport and exploded, sending burning debris about one hundred meters. Spectators close to the flight line never had a chance. Among the eighty-five dead were nineteen children. There were also children among the five hundred injured.

  The Sknyliv Airfield crash drew international attention and criticism. It could not and would not go unanswered or unpunished. Someone would pay. Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma began by banning military aircraft from flying in Ukrainian airshows, a ban he later lifted. He also fired the head of the Ukrainian air force. Most of the blame, however, fell on the pilots, whose fragile defense was base
d largely on their claim that the map of the airfield, including the airshow layout, was erroneous. The cockpit voice recorder seemed to support them: During the flight, one of the pilots asked the other about the location of the spectators, allegedly shown incorrectly on the map.

  In June 2005, three years after the disaster, a military court found the pilot, Volodymyr Toponar, and co-pilot, Yuriy Yegorov, guilty of negligence and of violating flight rules by straying from the planned routine and ignoring an audio cockpit warning that told them “the aircraft is experiencing hypercritical G-loads.” Toponar was sentenced to fourteen years in prison and fined $1,400,000 while Yegorov was given eight years and a fine of $400,000.

  Three other military officials were implicated, accused of “violating aircraft regulations, leading to disaster.” They also were convicted and received prison time and fines. The money would be used to reimburse survivors for their losses. Sentences were later reduced for some of the convicted. There are no records of fines being collected or dispersed.

  The first appearance of military fighter jets at airshows in the 1940s raised the level of excitement—and risk—for spectators. The jet genie was out of the bottle and would never return. Larger and faster became the norm. The inevitable results were aircraft such as the Su-27, a flying machine so capable that it required a new word to describe it: “supermaneuverable.”

  Just to be clear, the Su-27 was neither designed nor intended to accommodate airshow work, but the temptation to show it off was irresistible. In some ways, it is perfect for performing before spectators. The Su-27 is one of a few fighters with enough power to stand on its tail and wave its nose back and forth to spectators like a pet cobra, the popular “Pugachev’s cobra.” That’s the good news for the airshow spectators. The bad news is that the Su-27 is heavy and fast enough to smack the ground with the lethal footprint of an asteroid.

  Sukhoi SU-27 Flanker, similiar to that which crashed at Sknyliv air show.

  Airshow organizers are well aware of the dangers of crowds too close to the flying. Evhen Marchuk, part of a Ukrainian government commission that investigated the Sknyliv crash, gave a statement that conceded the pilots did not follow the airshow flight plan, but he also mitigated the roles of the disgraced flight crew by spreading the blame. Marchuk cited the unreasonably-small flying zone mandated for the pilots and criticized show organizers for allowing spectators too close to the flight line.

  Move the crowds? Where to? To be safe from the crash of a modern front-line jet fighter, the audience would need to be located such a great distance away from the action that the people might as well stay home and watch the show on television. Perform the maneuvers at a higher altitude? A cobra done properly faces the grandstands, comrade. At a safer altitude, it would be tantamount to a grand slam home run in an empty stadium. You can’t applaud what you can’t see. Not do the cobra or any of the other maneuvers, such as the notorious vertical rolling dive? Are you kidding?

  Fences and screens would not protect the crowds, as they mostly do at, say, NASCAR races. When something goes wrong with a thirty-two thousand pound jet close to the ground, Providence is the only guardian, a fickle one at best.

  The world’s jet fighter and attack aircraft, in teams or solo, are a fixture on airshow bills around the world. They’re here to stay. All involved seem to accept the risk, including the spectators, however unwittingly. Some jet teams have curbed their acts a bit; they fly a bit higher and have abandoned riskier maneuvers. The U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels, for instance, no longer perform even the basic “split-s,” which was dropped from the routine after a fatal 2016 crash. Other teams—the Russians come to mind—remain, for lack of a better word, undeterred.

  Indeed, the Russians and other eastern European teams continue to step up their act. They now have the “kulbit,” the inevitable evolution of the cobra. The kulbit begins with standing the post-stall aircraft on its tail as in a cobra, but goes one step further by flipping backward into an insanely-tight inside loop not much larger than the length of the aircraft fuselage. The effect is of an aircraft trying to touch its own tail. Dramatic, but only at low altitude, where the folks can see and enjoy it, and applaud.

  While the cobra was designed as a dogfighting tactic to allow a pilot to suddenly stop in the air and watch a duped and doomed pursuer get ahead of him, the kulbit seems to have been designed merely to dazzle spectators, much as the lomcevak, another maneuver that originated in Eastern Europe. To date, only the Su-27 and MiG-29 variants are known to have performed the kulbit.

  When no one gets hurt, up-close jet fighter crashes rank as the greatest spectator sport of all, worth well beyond the price of admission. In 1993, two MiG-29s collided during a performance at the Royal International Air Tattoo in Fairford, England. The Russian pilots ejected and floated down gently as their aircraft crashed well away from, but in view of the grandstands, injuring no one. One of the Russian pilots was so moved by the experience that he lit a cigarette as he walked back among bits of the burning wreckage that had been his ride. The people cheered. (A romanticized version of the event, in which the pilot lit his cigarette on a flaming remnant of the MiG-29, circulated widely but never happened. No one’s that cool.)

  State-of-the-art jet fighters have much in common with a certain unloved creature from Gothic literature: they are made of many different parts and given unconditional life, have immense power but no sense of morality. Their creators, who bet their reputations on each one, desire only to show them off and bask in the glory. That is, until the creatures run amok, at which point there is no backup plan except to run like hell.

  56

  SISTERS

  THE Spirit of St. Louis was never intended to fly airshows. A big, boxy aircraft built for a single long-range solo flight, the Spirit was inherently unstable in all three axes. Flying it was an ongoing battle against uninvited pitch, roll, and yaw inputs. Working against the instability to maintain heading and altitude may have helped Charles Lindbergh remain awake during the thirty-three-and-a-half hour flight to Paris.

  But airshow performers, always looking for an edge, have employed some very unlikely aircraft over the years, including replicas of the Spirit of St. Louis. The more improbable the aircraft, the more it seems to please the crowd. As a bonus, stunting an aircraft not built for the job keeps the competition to a minimum, for the same reasons few challenged Harry Houdini to a breath-holding contest while hanging upside down in the Hudson River wearing a straitjacket.

  The late Bob Hoover put on a show in an Aero Commander Shrike that was a tough act to follow, much less duplicate. There may never be another act as unique as Delmar Benjamin’s aerobatic routine in his replica Gee Bee R2, the barrel-bodied, tragedy-plagued racer of the early 1930s. Benjamin performed in the Gee Bee R2 for ten years until he retired it in 2002, undamaged. He entertained untold spectators while also vindicating the Gee Bee’s reputation as a killer. Matt Younkin’s amazing night aerobatic show, Magic by Moonlight, in a lit-up Beech 18, an aircraft decidedly not built for aerobatics, comes to mind. His father, the late Bobby Younkin, also performed aerobatics in a Beech 18.

  The ungainly Ford Trimotor, probably the least aerobatic airplane ever built, is another exception that proves the rule. At least three airshow performers of the 1920s and 1930s—Harold Johnson, Charles “Speed” Holman, and a pilot remembered only as “Crazy John from Texas”—stunted the Trimotors at airshows across the country. Not at high altitude, but right off the deck.

  Aerobatics were the last thing on Lindbergh’s mind as he helped design the Spirit of St. Louis. Yet, in 1932, an aircraft described as the sister ship, or at least a close cousin, of the Spirit operated on the show circuit for a number of years as a stunt plane and racer. Thanks to the Associated Press, a record exists of its last day in a short article that ran on May 23, 1932, in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review.

  At the time, the Spirit of St. Louis double was part of the Delano American Legion Air Circus from Delano, California. The art
icle describes it as “rounding a pylon in a trial flight at 250 feet when it lost altitude. A wing dragged and the ship nosed over and crashed. Fire shot from the wreckage.”

  The pilot, Fred Larson, twenty-five years old, was trapped in the burning aircraft and died. Roy Shleppy, the race “flagger,” rescued a passenger, William Simmons, who was badly injured but alive. At the end of the article, almost as an afterthought, the aircraft was described as the “sister ship of the Spirit of St. Louis.”

  It’s unlikely the aircraft that crashed in California was the actual sister ship to the famous ocean crosser. Ryan Airlines had indeed built an exact replica of the Spirit forty-five days after the original was completed but it was sold to a Japanese newspaper. It reportedly set a number of records in 1928 but was lost the same year in a crash. The air circus promoters at Delano probably doctored a Ryan Brougham, a similar aircraft, to look like the Spirit in an effort to milk the reputation of the original.

  The public fascination with the aircraft that changed the world has never ended. Many Spirit of St. Louis replicas have been built over the years and some have performed in airshows. On May 31, 2003, seventy-one years after the crash of the “sister ship” in California, another Spirit replica, working an airshow in England, suffered a wing failure in front of eight thousand spectators at the Coventry Classic Airshow. The pilot, Pierre Hollander, fifty-nine years old, was killed.

  Hollander, a well-respected and popular performer from Sweden, had been in the air about two minutes. He was climbing and getting into position to begin his routine when a wing strut attach fitting failed. The wing folded back and the aircraft went straight down just outside the airfield. Hollander and his Spirit of St. Louis, which he built himself, had been a hit with fans in Europe and England for a number of years.