Ahc warbirds
For a few lucky pilots though, the chance to make that leap from observer to owner becomes reality.īy today’s standards, warbirds are clunky, noisy, dirty, inefficient and expensive to operate, not to mention almost completely impractical. Around the world, warbirds are treated as senior citizens should be, with much reverence, love and care. You might at first think the fan base for 70- or 80-year-old airplanes is small, but most crazies are like me, attracted to these historical artifacts by the romance of what once was - sprinkled with a dash of awe and respect for those who expertly flew and maintained them in combat. My interest in old airplanes never really made sense to most people I knew, not even to me, really, yet I hungered to see and touch a Corsair or a Mitchell bomber or an old Boeing whenever I could, even years later when I found myself surrounded by a flock of F-100s on my first Air Force base assignment.Īirplane aficionados come in all shapes, sizes, ages, sexes and nationalities, as do the airplanes they drool over. I learned much about that 20,000-pound single-engine piston fighter, facts I still remember. He’d stop by our house when he was home on leave and quiz me about the airplanes I’d been watching or reading about. Then there was my Air Force veteran cousin, who flew A-1 Skyraiders during the Vietnam War. “You were the kid with the green hat standing there with his mouth wide open, weren’t you?” he asked. I recall meeting a P-51 pilot late one afternoon who said he remembered passing me while taxiing in. Hundreds of homebuilts, factory-builts and, of course, warbirds taxied past. I worked the flight line with a pair of painted ping-pong paddles, pointing aircraft that passed in the grass to their parking spots. It was during a summer volunteer job at the EAA Airshow in Rockford, Illinois, the precursor to AirVenture.
I have never thought of myself as much of a warbird guy - at least until I went back in time to the summer I was unsuspectingly infected with a love for old military airplanes.