I met him shortly before this at the Merced Fly in. I helped him push this Chipmunk ( he had two) out of a hanger. I asked him about the retractable landing gear. He told me, it was from a Bellanca Viking. His other Chipmunk had fixed gear. He died in his Pitts, filming an inverted flat spin over the ocean off the coast of California, for the movie Top Gun. His last radio transmission was “ Im in trouble”. His body and plane were never recovered.
In the early 1970s, when I was a young Civil Air Patrol cadet, I got to meet both Art Scholl and Bob Hoover, at an air show in Torrance, California. It’s a great memory for me. People tend to wonder about the true purpose of airshows. Why are taxpayer dollars spent on the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels? Why do the great air show pilots do what they do? Here’s your answer. They did it, and still do it, for kids like me. They do it so that kids will say, yeah, that’s what I want to do! And even if a kid with Coke bottle-thick glasses can’t get an airline pilot job, there’s a place for them in the aviation industry. I joined the Air Force the day after my eighteenth birthday to become a USAF air traffic controller. While it didn’t work out for me to join the FAA as a controller, I did eventually settle into a career in aviation maintenance. I’m wrapping up 35 years as a mechanic for United Airlines. I also became a part owner of a Bellanca Decathlon which I use for tailwheel proficiency and dabbling in aerobatics (you’ll never see me performing at an airshow). So, yeah. It stuck. Airshows are for kids like me!
