Warbirds roadshow: The Planes of Fame Midwest WWII Fighter Tour - the start of a great adventure

Air Classics, Jun 2003 by O'Leary, Michael

Aviation is a small world, sometimes a very small world. It was 19 March and I was in the back of the Curtiss Warhawk being flown by Kevin Eldridge. We were somewhere over Oklahoma and the cloud deck was descending with the sky getting noticeably darker. Kevin was flying tight on the wing of the Corsair and Lightning aircraft on the first leg of the Planes of Fame Midwest WWII Fighter Tour and we were looking for a place to land.

"Know what the date is?" asked Kevin over the intercom.

A bit puzzled, I replied "the 19th."

"That's right," he said. "It was on the 19th nine years ago, right to the hour, that I bailed out of the Super Corsair." I clearly remember that overcast afternoon at the former Williams AFB when, during the 1994 Phoenix 500 Unlimited race, Kevin pulled the Super Corsair up out of the race, trailing thick smoke which soon turned into huge gouts of flame. Robbie Patterson was flying Daryl Bond's TF-51D Mustang as safety place with Bob Hoover in the back seat. Robbie locked onto the stricken racer. "I could feel the heat from the fire through the Mustang canopy," Robbie later commented.

Kevin hit the emergency fire bottle system and the blaze went out - just briefly and it was then back roaring even more violently. On the ground, I listened on the radio as Robbie yelled, "Get out of that thing, Kevin. NOW!"

The canopy went back and we could clearly see Kevin stand up in the cockpit and then exit the burning aircraft. Unfortunately, we could also see Kevin smash into the vertical as the Super Corsair pointed its nose towards the earth. Kevin fell free from the place and, after what seemed to be an eternity, his parachute opened as the Corsair struck the earth and exploded. What we on the ground did not know was that Kevin had received major injuries that would require months of recuperation.

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it?" I replied.

"Yep," said Kevin as we flew toward the gathering darkness.

"Back when Mint Moore III was organizing the Corsair Gathering at Mt. Comfort, Indiana," recalled Ray Dieckman, "Mint and I had talked a number of times about getting my FG-1D Marine's Dream from California to Indiana. That is an expensive undertaking and the money the sponsors were offering barely covered the fuel. However, Mint got creative on me. He proposed that he would get the Corsair into several midwest airshows besides the Corsair Gathering and the fees from those events would cover the costs and add money to the account to keep the Corsair flying. That approach seemed to make a lot of sense."

Ray is originally from Ohio and a friend offered the use of his hangar at Cincinnati to house the Corsair between shows. "Being an airline pilot, I could shuttle between California and the shows and Mint's plan began to pay dividends as well as being a lot of fun. I would eventually go on to do ten airshows before bringing Marine's Dream back to Chino.

"Back home, I thought about what Mint had put together and how it had promoted Warbird aviation as well as making a profit. I approached my good friend Steve Hinton at The Planes of Fame Air Museum and told him what Mint had done. The museum is on a big fund raising mission to complete their ambitious hangar building program and I told Steve that, if handled correctly, a midwest tour of Warbirds could bring needed funds to the museum.

"Steve, Mint, and I got together last September and began to hammer out the overall plan for what would become known as the Planes of Fame Midwest WWII Fighter Tour. We selected the Lightning, Corsair, Warhawk, and Hellcat as the four aircraft which would participate in the tour since these are rare machines not often seen by the average airshow spectator. Mint would be responsible for scheduling the shows while I became the managing director of the tour Steve and crew would get the aircraft ready to go. It was an ambitious program."

As readers well know, Planes of Fame believes in flying their aircraft but, for the most part, flights are local and of relatively short duration. The initial flight of the tour would be a lengthy cross-country from Chino to Columbus, Georgia, during March - a time period when weather across the United States is variable (and taking over nine hours flying time).

"To add some excitement, we decided to paint two of our aircraft in new schemes," said Hinton. "The Lightning was refinished in the Olive Drab and Neutral Gray camouflage of a P-38 flown by Maj. Edward 'Porky' Cragg of the 80th Fighter Squadron - the Headhunters." One of the tour pilots is Chris Fahey who flew F-16s with the 80th Tactical Fighter Squadron - the inheritor unit for the 80th FS. The Headhunters have an active association and were able to raise money to contribute to the painting of the P-38.

Cragg is one of our more overlooked fighter aces of the Second World War. Joining the 80th FS in New Guinea during the dark days of early 1942, Cragg began flying Bell P-39 Airacobras and his first aircraft was named Porky I. He became the commander of the 80th FS on 8 April 1943. "He was a very aggressive pilot, " states Col. Jay E. "JayBird" Riedel, USAF (Ret.), who is one of the spark plugs behind the Headhunters' organization. "Sometimes if his aircraft would not start, he would run over to another Lightning, pull the pilot out, jump in, and go fly the mission. Cragg had our squadron named 'Headhunters' in honor of the local headhunter tribes of New Guinea. These tribes hated the Japanese because the troops often used the natives for slave labor. Whenever our pilots were shot down over the jungle, these natives would help return them safely to the 80th's base.