Westland Lysander

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The National Warplane Museum in Geneseo, New York, annually puts on an air show with both static and flying displays of vintage World War II fighters and bombers in midsummer.  An Internet search Friday on July 11^th reminded me that the show was that weekend and that I had better act fast if I wanted not to miss it. I made a hurried telephone call to my Oswegonian friend Richard Fader. Was he interested? Fader (as everyone calls him) immediately said yes and agreed to accompany me to the event the next day, Saturday, July 12th. He even offered to drive. He wanted to put his new Toyota through its paces. I responded by offering to buy the tickets.

Geneseo lies about two hours south and west of Oswego by car, not far short of Buffalo and Niagara Falls.  Fader and I arrived there around noon and parked the car at the bottom of the ridge below the SUNY campus that Geneseo hosts.  There were probably three thousand people in attendance under a patchily clouded sky in about eighty degrees of slightly humid heat.  The first thing I noticed as we found our way to a parking spot was a loud throbbing in the air.  When I climbed out of the Toyota, I saw rising in a graceful maneuver over the grass field the characteristic twin-boom shape of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a powerful, twin-engine fighter that helped the Allies win air superiority in both Europe and the Pacific during WWII.  I had seen examples of the P-38 before in museums.  This was the first time I had seen one in flight.  A big machine, the P-38 takes to the air like a swallow.  Its flighty Terpsichore belies its legendary deadliness in aerial combat.  (The Germans nicknamed it “The Fork-Tailed Devil.”)

Fader and I made our way first to the static displays outside the museum hangar.  There we visited the Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar, a massive post-WWII cargo carrier and paratroop transport, walked under the wing of a Douglas C-47 Skytrain transport (the military version of the famous DC-3 airliner), which would later take to the sky in a commemoration of the D-Day landings of seventy years ago, and inspected a number of smaller aircraft.  The cargo bay of the Boxcar is as big as a four-car garage

Next we sought out the flight line.  There were dozens of machines parked in neat rows, among which visitors were invited to walk.  Fader and I had made our way past several of these immaculately maintained machines and were examining a rare surviving Westland Lysander, a British reconnaissance monoplane of the 1930s, used in the first years of the war against Germany, when a peculiar sweet rumble caught our ears.

Over on the flight line, a beautiful, twin-engine machine painted in gray and green camouflage pattern, had just begun to run up its engines.  The National Air Force Museum of Canada had sent its flying De Havilland Mosquito, one of only a handful still airworthy, to participate in the three-day event.  During the war, British industry suffered a shortage of “strategic materials,” such as aluminum and other metals whose qualities informed the idea of a modern airplane.  The De Havilland Company met the emergency with a fast fighter-bomber powered by two Rolls Royce Merlin engines (the same engine used by the Supermarine Spitfire) and constructed almost entirely of stressed plywood.

Standing behind the Mosquito, we could feel the prop-wash, as it is called, a pleasant breezy relief from the heat.  The pilot taxied his machine to the end of the field, took to the air, and put on a remarkable display, with numerous low, high-speed passes over the landing strip.  Airplanes designed to fly fast must conform themselves to aerodynamic shapes that reduce air resistance.  This requirement, pushed to the limit by wartime aircraft designers, resulted in machines that, despite their deadly purpose, can be sculpturally beautiful.  There is an aesthetic of the fighter plane.  The Mosquito fulfills it exemplarily.  Adjective that come to mind are sleek, curvaceous, and sportive.  American designs from the same period look angular and aggressive.

Later, Fader and I were privileged to see in the air all at once, two North American P-51 Mustangs, one Chance-Vought F4U Corsair (a naval fighter-bomber), and the P-38 Lightning in a repeat performance.  In their turn, a North American B-25 Mitchell, the bomber used by General Doolittle in his 1942 raid on Tokyo, a Douglas B-26 Invader, and two C-47s flew a display circuit in formation.  It is not only the vision of these splendid aerial mounts, maintained in flying condition by dedicated groups of men and women, that sends a chill down my spine and makes me whoop with delight like a kid; it is also the sound of the engines, the roar, the amazing leaps and pirouettes in the sky.

Spinning propeller blades are dangerous, it goes without saying. In our nanny society, the usual gesture would be the resort to hyper-safety, treating everyone, including the adults, like three-year-olds who must be removed as far as possible from any hazard to assure that no disaster happens.  The attitude of the air show administrators was admirably different. Whenever a pilot mounted his machine and began running up the engine or engines, extremely polite docents asked courteously that people step back to a minimally safe distance.  The crowd responded obligingly and intelligently.  That meant that everyone got the maximum of experience of the machines, as they thrummed into life.

The color-commentary on the fly-pasts, broadcast through loudspeakers, was accompanied by music from the 1940s: Recordings of Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers, and Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again.”  There was, blissfully, no rock and roll.  The airfield is an old farm, still partly in production, with the ripe grain visible just beyond the closely mown runway. Indeed, the pyrotechnic supplement of a “mock bombing run” started a small blaze in the corn, which the Geneseo Fire Department efficiently extinguished. The bucolic setting suggested the war years, when similar machines flew from strips in England’s fields and pastures green.

Many wives and mothers exhibited saintly patience while their husbands and sons stared in amazement at the artifacts of a bygone age and inspected them up-close or talked with the pilots who fly them and the mechanics who maintain them. People posed to have their photographs taken standing in front of the Mustangs or the Mosquito or the Corsair.  Fader and I returned to Oswego late in the day, driving through the dairy country that separates the Thruway from the southern shore of Lake Ontario.

— Comments —

Matthew Schneider writes:

Dr. Bertonneau, how I envy your experiencing–in person–a De Havilland Mosquito in flight! I’ve only seen them in the movies:  A Matter of Life and Death and 633 Squadron.

I may owe my very existence to the other great twin-engined fighter-bomber you saw in flight, the P-38 Lightning.  Somewhere in the Philippines during the summer of 1944, my father was advancing in a column when two Mitsubishi A6M Zeros roared over the tree line and turned for a strafing run.  As the Zeros circled in for a ground attack, readying their machine guns and 20 mm cannons, two Lightnings–who had apparently been following the Zeros unnoticed–thundered in to engage the Japanese, shooting one down and driving the other off. Needless to say, the Lightning is my favorite warbird!

More than two decades ago, the sight of a Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire making a low pass over a runway in Santa Monica, California moved me to tears when I remembered how The Few, outnumbered six to one, took to the air in these beautiful machines to repel Nazi barbarians from England’s pastures green. Seeing the planes in flight brings home–as nothing else can–how unimaginably brave those men were.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

Matt Schneider’s poignant recollection of his debt to the P-38 Lightning is gratifying indeed.  I thank him for it.  Matt and I go way back.  We studied with the same teachers in graduate school in the 1980s.  Vintage aviation has been a topic of conversation between us ever since those days.  We had recourse to the topic by way of self-defense.  The graduate literature programs in the 1980s were in the throes of the deconstruction orgasm, in the full intensity of its weird unreality. Lightnings, Mustangs, and Spitfires were powerful references to reality.  Matt once made the pilgrimage, with my father and me, to the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California. This was in the days before Onstar and other disembodied voices that tell the driver where to go. We got lost, had a good Mexican lunch, and eventually found the place. “References to reality” – that phrase explains much of my fondness for the antique flying machines.

Paul writes:

Professor Bertonneau should know better than to throw red meat out to male students.  Yes, the grace, super noise, and speed of the remarkable vintage aircraft is something to behold in person.  I have been to at least six air shows, exclusive of impromptu shows, and each one always included these vintage aircraft.  His preference is for the grace and hum of prop planes. My preference is big, loud vintage jets and the most modern jet aircraft (fighter, bomber, or transport).

I live near two major air stations that used to hold yearly air shows.  The closest used to host 150,000 plus visitors in a weekend. Obama has cut back to every other year. And attendance is down to about 100,000.  Why would a patriot cut back on a publicity jewel, especially for fanatical Southern American patriots?  Children, hot dogs, hamburgers, sodas, barbecue, sun, and fathers.  My father always came with me.  He did not have to hear any pestering about unhealthy eating, besides being an ex-Marine.  Nobody else wanted to go, not that I would not have invited him.  Poor Daddy. I would make him stay until dusk, when they flew the F-15s or F-14s or both.

And I get to rush to my windows to see the fighters pass over my condo, usually too late because of the speed and my restricted view. My mother caught my enthusiasm and used to run out on her deck when she heard them and wave, as I used to do (and still do).  She had real good ears.  By 1992, she had moved about forty miles north of the Belle Chasse station.  One year, an F-15 pilot would circle around and twice pass directly over her home and wag his wings as she waved at him. He did this at least six times. Was it for her or a girlfriend or a family in the subdivision?  (It was a huge deck that could have shown her and that I tore up and rebuilt for her in “that hideous” heat, with my poor father’s help, to ensure it was an inch away from the slab and filled it with gently-sloped River sand, so it could not hold water or hide the major Formosan termite threat.)  She loved, to the degree that maybe only a wife and mother can, her beautiful pink-brick home.

Following the air shows’ introductions with vintage prop planes, which appeared between the jet appearances, the high point, in my view, was when the local F4 Phantom squadron (at about 11:30) would come silently out of nowhere, at about 100-200 feet, on full afterburners and scream over the crowd.  Even though regulars knew they were coming at some point, it was wonderful.  The Phantoms came even when the F15s took over, and they are also awesome. These craft are a staggering reminder of how violent the craft are and how vulnerable soldiers are to them.  Soldiers are helpless.  You grasp how quick and violent modern warfare is.  Indeed, they are both anti-war extravaganzas and patriotic.

The Phantom is my favorite vintage jet aircraft.  My father used to subscribe to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.  So I followed the development of the Phantom, which first flew in the 1950s.  It had a unique, large, and downward tilt to its nose, which needed to carry a large long-range radar.  It was huge, carried a payload still second to none, still has a range second to none, and has a speed faster than what replaced it.  Because of its brutish appearance, it is sometimes called The Beast.  It is deceptively aerodynamic.  Its powerful GE engines served it well.

So listen and look up America and wave when you see a military plane (fighter or transport) pass overhead.  The pilots notice when flying low enough.  Wave even if they are high.  Join the enthusiasm.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

Paul’s reminiscences delight me. I can match Paul’s wing-waving story involving the overflight of his mother’s house by the F-15s.

In the 1960s, my parents owned a small cabin between Sherwin Summit and the Owens River Gorge in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The Gorge is an amazing sight, deep and long.  My favorite pastime during vacations at the place was to walk the ridge of canyon.  I should add that in the 1960s there were many Air Force bases in California.  It was not unusual to see high-flying B-52 Stratofortresses in the skies above the Sierras.  In the late 60s, however, the Air Force began training B-52 crews to fly low-level “penetration missions” to avoid Soviet radar.

One day, while walking and daydreaming along the rim of the Gorge, I heard a distant rumbling.  Low and behold, several hundred feet below me in the canyon, an enormous, eight-engine bomber lumbered into view.  This would have been 1967 or 68.  I was thirteen or fourteen years old.  I immediately took off my jacket and began waving it vigorously over my head.  I must have been in clear view.  As the Stratofortress passed directly beneath the rocky outcrop on which I stood, its pilot waved his wings.  What a thrill!

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