The Crowd Pleasers

by Pete Fusco

  There will always be a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis flying somewhere. As recently as 2016, a near-exact copy debuted at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Red Hook, New York. The Aerodrome is a flying museum where, for the price of a ticket, a spectator can step back one hundred years to an age when aircraft were born with souls and temperament, each a bit different but none inclined to indulge the unprepared.

  The Spirit of St. Louis, its significance undiminished by time or progress, graces the ceiling in the atrium of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Other aircraft in the museum are little more than what they appear: Relics. The Bell X-1 rocket plane, in which Chuck Yeager heroically blasted aviation to the next level by breaking the sound barrier, borders on the whimsical, a Flash Gordon serial prop. The Space Shuttle, the grandest thing NASA minds and the public’s billions could imagine fifty years ago, resides in the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. The shuttle added much to man’s knowledge at the cost of many brave crewmember lives, but now looks as dated as a child’s Big Wheel left out in the weather.

  The Spirit of St. Louis is great art, possessed of lasting consequence, a poem written in a dream forever defying interpretation, its ability to haunt the soul and excite the mind inextinguishable. Pilots yet to be born will draw inspiration from it. Anyone who doubts the enduring, irresistible appeal need only pay it a visit. Though surrounded by illustrious distractions, all eyes fall first on the Spirit of St. Louis, hanging exposed in its silver-pigmented dope underwear. (Lindbergh rejected the extra weight of paint and everyone else assumed the ship wouldn’t be around long enough to need any.) But visitor beware. Stare too long and the suspending cables disappear. Now you’re in the damned thing, battling the unshakeable angst that gnawed at Lindbergh’s spine and knotted his guts on that lonely, improbable underdog flight over an indifferent ocean, at night.

  57

  SHOCKWAVE

  THE Masters of Disaster extravaganza brought beauty and the beast to the airshow. The beauty showed up in the flying of three of the best airshow pilots ever to earn the title. The beast was everything else about the show. Unscripted beauty and chaotic beast worked together in an act that looked back to the blurred history of airshows and also pointed to its blurred future.

  The extravaganza ended after two seasons, suddenly and unexpectedly, in a midair collision that killed Jimmy Franklin, fifty-seven, and Bobby Younkin, forty-nine, at an airshow in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada, on July 10, 2005. Jim LeRoy, the third member of the team, landed safely after the accident.

  The Masters of Disaster show contained so many diverse elements and moved so rapidly that it is difficult to describe. Begin by imagining a very large audience that had waited all day for the featured act. A recorded voice, a combination of Darth Vader and Robby the Robot kicked off the show with a cheap shot at the Federal Aviation Administration, which in this case was the Fully Automated Annihilators that existed in a dangerous time long ago when strange vehicles inhabited Earth.

  Each of the three pilots waiting to take off was easily a showstopper all by himself, but that would have been in a normal airshow. This was the Masters of Disaster and all three were about to perform together, both choreographed and free-style, with lots of added attractions.

  Jimmy Franklin was in his 1940-era Waco biplane powered by the expected Pratt and Whitney R-985 of 450 horsepower and a quite unexpected jet engine strapped to its belly that added another 1,600 horsepower. The plane’s takeoff roll was less than fifty feet! Bobby Younkin waited in Samson, a strapping and capable but seldom-seen brute of a biplane designed in the 1940s. The third pilot was Jim LeRoy in Bulldog, a modern Pitts biplane enjoying three times the horsepower around which it had been originally designed. No airshow pilots ever showed up better prepared for action than the Masters of Disaster.

  Once the trio of protagonists were in the air the show began. There were no good guys or bad guys, just three immensely-gifted virtuosos weaving solo maneuvers into a running mock dogfight with planned near misses and chases. The aerial gyrations were accompanied on the ground by explosions, a wall of fire, clouds of smoke, wolves howling, sirens wailing and, needless to say, very loud rock music. And, lest it be forgotten, a 300 mph jet-powered truck known as Shockwave.

  The smoke-filled air did not cause the accident. There was plenty of smoke, but Franklin and Younkin collided in a patch of blue sky while doing a Derry Turn, a maneuver that Canada’s Transportation Safety Board investigator misspelled, concluding that, “… the Dairy Turn maneuver had been modified such that a temporary loss of visual contact could occur immediately before the aircraft crossed flight paths. This modification made timing critical and added two potential points of collision … ” The report also pointed out, correctly, that the top wing of a biplane can obstruct forward and upward visibility. In short, the Canadian investigators felt that there was just too much going on and not enough visual contact between the three biplanes.

  The Masters of Disaster not only broke but smashed the airshow mold. Franklin, Younkin, and LeRoy, known as the “X Team,” conceived, practiced, and delivered something fresh and entirely outrageous to the circuit, a combination of modern aerobatics and an old war movie. The show appealed to all ages, from the veteran airshow goer to the hard-to-impress younger generation, the so-called “millennials,” who thrive on computer-generated violence and require nothing less than an explosion to get them to look up from their smart phones. There was nothing computer-generated about the Masters of Disaster. The ground explosions were as close to the real deal as one could get without calling in an air strike.

  Jimmy Franklin’s outstanding airshow career was notable for innovative acts, including “The Dueling Wacos,” and a dual wing-walking act. For a while, he was ZAR, a videogame-type space character who flew aerobatics in a wicked-looking black twin-engine Ted Smith Aerostar corporate aircraft known as Starship Pride. Everyone loved ZAR! There was also the never-to-be-forgotten jet-powered Waco biplane that Franklin was flying when the fatal midair occurred.

  Bobby Younkin was also known to bring something different to the party. In 1989 he modified a Beech 18 for airshow work. His ballet-like routine in the twin-engine Beech brought him success and fame. He later upped his game with a full aerobatic performance in a Learjet 23, a corporate jet with airshow possibilities only Younkin seemed to recognize. He had also worked airshows in Samson, the airplane he was flying at Moose Jaw when he was killed.

  Jimmy Franklin’s son, Kyle, and Bobby Younkin’s son, Matt, followed in their famous fathers’ footsteps. Both are popular and outstanding airshow pilots.

  Jim LeRoy, the surviving member of the troupe, refused to allow the Masters of Disaster to fade away. He added new pilots and continued with variations of the show until his death in a crash of Bulldog II at a Dayton airshow two years later on July 28, 2007. He was forty-six years old.

  The barnstormers of the free-for-all era after World War One would not only have approved of the Masters of Disaster, they may have been the inspiration. Mock dogfights were often featured in early air circuses. And, had the jet engine been available, one can easily imagine stuntman extraordinaire Ormer Locklear strapping it to the belly of a Curtiss Jenny. For the barnstormers knew what the Masters of Disaster knew: The crowd is not easily pleased. Spectators often need to be slapped into paying attention.

  In the years between the air circuses of the 1920s and the coming of the Masters of Disaster, several generations of airshow pilots entertained spectators with precision flying routines, inverted ribbon pickups, and the always-popular clown acts. Hard to say what they might have thought or might be thinking of the background music, explosions, and fire. Anomaly or evolution? Heresy or progress?

  Will a show on the scale of Masters of Disaster ever be brought back? Should it be brought back? It drew the crowds so it’s probably just a matter of time. The Tinstix of Dynamite act, featuring the flamboyant flying of Skip Stewart and Melissa Pemberton, is remin
iscent, which is to say it has walls of fire and the irrepressible Shockwave, the jet truck.

  Entertaining, but not the genuine article. Like the Big Bang, the Masters of Disaster contained the elements, the heat, and the pressure required to create something new: An airshow unlike any other. And, like the Big Bang, it was pretty damn spectacular but could only happen once.

  58

  CRITICAL MASS

  THE Galloping Ghost was traveling nearly 500 mph at the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada, on September 16, 2011, when it crashed and disintegrated in the crowd. The pilot, James K. Leeward, seventy-four years old, and ten others on the ground were killed. Another sixty-nine persons were injured, fifteen critically. It was the deadliest air race crash in history.

  All remaining races were cancelled. Pilots and their crews packed up and left Reno, thinking about “Jimmy” Leeward, an admired and well-liked veteran and a competitor to the core. They also wondered about and discussed what might have gone wrong with The Galloping Ghost.

  The Ghost was a North American P-51 Mustang, the most recognizable United States fighter aircraft of World War Two, if not of all time. About fifteen thousand P-51s were built. When the war ended, it got in line for the smelter along with all the other aircraft lacking peacetime employment. Some P-51s escaped and a good many of those became racers, the perfect aircraft for the unlimited Thompson Trophy Races in Cleveland in 1946. The P-51 was lighter, more streamlined and nimble than anything else on the field. Nothing, it was believed, would be able to touch it.

  Except it didn’t work that way. First place in 1946 went to a Bell P-39 Airacobra and second to a Lockheed P-38 Lightning. The Galloping Ghost placed fourth that year.

  The P-51 owners, having finished out of the money, went to work. They cut and lightened airframes and tweaked the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines to run at low altitude in warm air, an unhappy environment for an engine designed for the cold, thin air at high altitude.

  However, between 1946 and 1949, when the Cleveland races ended, a P-51 won the Thompson Trophy Race only once, in 1948, at a speed of 383 mph. Its chief competition, two ex-Navy Corsair racers, were faster by far but both dropped out of the race for mechanical reasons. The Galloping Ghost finished second that year at 365 mph.

  In 1964, unlimited racing returned, this time in Reno, Nevada, along with pilots, crews, and spectators more enthusiastic than ever. Instead of getting back on the pylons, however, The Galloping Ghost, the worthy veteran of the postwar Cleveland races, had been stripped for parts over the years and left for dead.

  Not much is known about Ghost’s Dickensian life between the 1949 Thompson Trophy Race and when Dr. Cliff Cummins acquired it as a cannibalized carcass in 1963. Cummins recognized and respected Ghost’s racing pedigree. He restored the ship and made it faster than ever by, among other modifications, clipping the wings four feet and lowering the canopy profile.

  Cummins raced Ghost at Reno in 1969 as Miss Candace. He eventually sold the aircraft to a new owner, who continued the alterations and removed 600 pounds of excess weight in the process. The Galloping Ghost was now Jeannie, its most successful form, winning first place in the gold unlimited at Reno in 1980 and 1981. The same aircraft that raced at a speed of 365 mph in the 1948 Thompson achieved 433 mph in 1980. It was obviously a much different airplane and much better prepared to do battle around the pylons.

  Leeward acquired the ship in 1983. The wings had been clipped again; the wingspan was now ten feet shorter than when Ghost left the factory forty years before. The airplane was faster if less stable, an acceptable trade-off to Leeward, an experienced pilot of high-performance aircraft.

  Support crew assists Jimmy Leeward in The Galloping Ghost prior to flight. Courtesy of Distant Thunder Aviation Photography, LLC.

  After a few name swaps, Leeward rechristened the ship with its original moniker, The Galloping Ghost. It was now capable of 500 mph, an increase of about 130 mph more than it was originally designed to fly and much faster than when it raced at Cleveland in the late 1940s. It’s not clear if any of the many modifications to Ghost over the years were backed up with engineering data, although the same could be said for many of the other unlimited racing aircraft at Reno.

  On September 16, 2011, The Galloping Ghost’s endless modifications, years of punishing airframe stress, high-G loads, and the competitive racing environment at Reno reached critical mass. After finishing the third lap, Ghost was in third place when it pulled up to near vertical, rolled over, rocked its wings, and went straight down into the hundreds of spectators gathered in the “preferred viewing area.” Ghost struck the ground more like large ordnance than an aircraft, hitting with so much force that the gasoline it carried vaporized. There was no fire. Ghost left a crater more than six feet deep.

  The crash occurred when the left elevator trim tab separated from the aircraft. At the speeds the Ghost traveled, the elevator trim would have been full forward to hold the nose of the aircraft down. When the trim tab separated from the elevator, the nose pitched up so violently that it imposed an estimated fifteen Gs on Leeward—fifteen times his body weight. It was more than enough to cause him to black out, enough possibly to break his neck. Clear pictures taken of the ship descending into the crowd do not show a pilot in the cockpit. Since Leeward’s shoulder harness would have kept him in sight, one theory has it that the high Gs broke the seat itself.

  An incident, unnerving in its similarity, had occurred thirteen years before at the 1998 Reno races. Bob Hannah was flying a P-51 called Voodoo Chile when the same left elevator trim tab separated from the aircraft. The aircraft pitched up but did not roll over as did the Ghost. Instead, with its pilot unconscious from the high Gs, the Voodoo Chile climbed to almost ten thousand feet before Hannah fortunately regained consciousness. He was able to safely land the aircraft.

  In its investigation of the 2011 crash, the National Transportation Safety Board had help from a telltale photograph taken of Ghost inverted and silhouetted against a bright sky just fractions of a second before impact. The photograph shows the missing left elevator trim tab, the smoking gun. The P-51 was originally built with a trim tab on both sides of the elevator. To save weight and reduce an infinitesimal bit of drag, the right side trim tab had been removed. Rather than both trim tabs sharing flight loads, the left trim tab bore them alone.

  Investigators found that the increased flight load on the left trim tab, along with reused single-use trim assembly lock nuts, caused a bolt to loosen with resultant high speed flutter of the trim tab. The flutter caused the trim tab to separate from the aircraft, followed by the catastrophic consequences.

  A recommendation was made to National Championship Air Race officials that, as part of eligibility to enter future races, all aircraft would have to show engineering and flight test date for modifications. It also recommended that spectators be kept a further distance from the action.

  In 1949, Beguine, a highly-modified P-51, crashed into a home during the Thompson Trophy Race in Cleveland, killing the pilot, as well as a mother and her infant child. The accident—along with the start of the Korean War and the loss of grandstand seating—ended air racing in Cleveland.

  Public tolerance for risk has grown since then. In the 1950s, when there were only a few small nuclear bombs in the world, everyone lived in fear of nuclear attack. Today there are seemingly more large nuclear weapons in the world than BB guns, and no one gives instant incineration a second thought. Man has learned to rein his fear; he waits stoically for the next inevitable disaster. As for air racing, it will likely continue because competition is an irrepressible human instinct, not just part of our existence but likely responsible for it.

  59

  TOP OF THE WORLD

  ONE of the most filmed and photographed pilot and wing walker deaths is that of Jane Wicker, who was killed along with pilot Charlie Schwenker when the Stearman he was flying crashed at the Vectron Dayton Airshow on June 22, 2013.

  All seemed normal as Sc
hwenker flew the Stearman biplane Aurora past the spectators in a routine billed as “On Top of the World.” Schwenker rolled inverted to the left with Wicker sitting upright on the bottom left wing. At that point, the aircraft, still inverted, seemed to slow. The left wing dropped and struck the ground. The aircraft burst into flames. Schwenker, sixty-four, and Wicker, forty-five, were killed instantly.

  The aforementioned videos and photographs taken by spectators aided the National Transportation Safety Board in its investigation. If the Dayton accident is one of the most photographed, it is also one of the most detailed NTSB accounts of an airshow crash and the death of a pilot and wing walker.

  The NTSB determined that Schwenker had allowed the Stearman’s airspeed to decrease to below the target speed for the rolling maneuver. The aircraft was about 24 degrees short of full inverted flight when it stopped rolling. At an estimated 84 knots, which was 26 knots less than the target speed of 110 knots, Schwenker attempted to roll the aircraft to the right to recover from inverted flight instead of to the left, which is how he normally recovered. What appeared to be a roll to the right may have actually been the left wings losing lift and dropping during a stall.

  About a year later, the NTSB gave the probable cause of the crash as “the pilot’s controlled flight into terrain.” It also said Schwenker attempted to fly “a modified airshow maneuver, which placed the airplane at low altitude and airspeed and out of position within the performance area.” The NTSB also mitigated the accident somewhat, suggesting that Schwenker may have deviated from the normal routine to avoid hitting a Boeing 757 aircraft parked nearby.

  The Ohio State Highway Patrol, which determines the causes of aircraft crashes in Ohio—even as it enforces speed limits on Ohio highways—stamped “pilot error” on Schwenker within a month of the accident.