Steve Hinton

Flight Journal, Aug 2002 by Cleaver, Thomas McKelvey

"The Chino Kid" is at the top of

his game ...

Warbirds, movies, air racing and more Southern Cal's Av guru

"Steve Hinton seems like a happy-go-lucky guy," says "Pearl Harbor" director Michael Bay, "but if you're ever in the middle of a problem, you want to be with him; he's always just really, really calm. You know when he says `No' that it's really dangerous, but he'll push it right to that point. The crew felt completely safe with him flying ten feet above them in a sixty-year-old airplane at more than two hundred miles per hour while we were shooting. I love working with him."

Born into the California aviation culture on April Fools' Day in 1952 at the China Lake Naval Air Test Center, Steve recalls his earliest memories of going to Edwards Air Force Base to shop at the base exchange.

"My dad took me out on the flightline to see all those amazing airplanes that were there back in those days."

Few people meet their destiny at age 7, but that is exactly what happened to Steve.

"On the first day of second grade, at the end of first period, the Sister said we could draw on the blackboard. I saw a kid at the other end who could draw airplanes better than I could, and I wanted to meet him."

That kid was Jim Maloney, who was Steve's lifelong friend and flying partner until his 1983 death in a flying accident at age 30. Jim's father, Ed Maloney, owned The Air Museum "Planes of Fame," then in Claremont, California. Jim and Steve grew up washing the airplanes and sweeping out the museum as it was moved from Claremont to Buena Park to its permanent home at Chino Airport in 1965. Today, Planes of Fame is the oldest privately owned aviation museum in the world, and Steve Hinton-now Ed Maloney's son-in-- law-is its president.

Surprisingly, Hinton didn't start flying lessons until age 18. As he remembers it, "A CFI [certified flight instructor] named Jim Nunn gave me the first ten hours of dual, then I got my check ride from Ruth Johnson, who had been a WASP in WW II and had raced at Cleveland after the War. She took me on through my private rating."

Jim Maloney also became a pilot. "We did every odd job we could think of trying to build flying time," Hinton recalls. The two were out-of-the-- ordinary figures among those interested in the old airplanes at Chino. "We were actually about the same age all these guys had been when they first started to fly these airplanes, but we were just about the only ones of our age at the field who wanted to do this." As a result, Jim and Steve became known as "the Chino kids."

Hinton explains that being a 300-hour warbird pilot at age 20 in 1972 was different from what it would be today.

"Times were different back then. We had been eating and sleeping airplanes since we were kids. We had worked on them-doing everything from washing and painting them to changing engines. No one would have let us do it if we hadn't been known the way we were."

In 1974, Leroy Penhall, who was at that time importing Canadian-built Sabres and T-33 Shooting Stars released by the Canadian Armed Forces, gave Hinton the chance to live his childhood dream of flying the F-86 Sabre. He figured that if the people he wanted to sell the planes to saw one being flown by a guy as young as Hinton, they'd be a little less hesitant. To qualify, Hinton got his commercial and instrument ratings within two weeks.

"I think the Sabre is still my all-time favorite airplane. It was just as beautiful to fly on that first day as I had always known it would be--and still is."

One of Hinton's most memorable career flights involved delivering an F-86 to Bob Hoover at the 1974 Oshkosh Fly In.

"At the time, I had less than ten hours in type," he recalled. "I left Chino at 0600, headed for Albuquerque, flying with 120-gallon drop tanks, which gave me 675 gallons of fuel to go 620 miles."

The flight would only be possible if he went to 35,000 feet right after takeoff.

"I blasted off, and the cockpit fogged up to zero/zero as soon as I got the gear up," he remembers. Selecting "full hot" for cockpit air, the canopy cleared as he continued to climb.

"As I climbed through 32,000 around Palm Springs, my mask started to pressure up, and I noticed that the cockpit pressurization wasn't working according to the graph shown in the manual."

With a leaking oxygen mask, he dropped to 24,000 before the regulator returned to normal. Too low to make Albuquerque, he landed at Phoenix for fuel. Inspection did not reveal the source of the problem, so the trip was replanned to deal with the lack of pressurization.

"The leg to Amarillo was another interesting experience," he recalls with understatement. At 24,000 feet, the main fuel gauge started to go down, which indicated that the drop tanks were empty; but the left wing was flying heavy, since the left drop was not empty. In Amarillo, he resealed the airpressure fitting to the right tank, refueled and took off for Kansas City. While fueling there, he found a split cockpit airduct hose and replaced it, hoping to fix the pressurization. The afternoon brought a sky full of clouds.