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| On June 12,2011 another boyhood dream come true. In the late '50s I had seen the 1945 B/W movie "God Is My Co-Pilot" (starring Dennis Morgan) on TV a few times and then read the book by Robert Lee Scott. "Scotty" was one of my major heroes. At Happy Haven (our summer place in Cedar Lake, IN), I made a miniature P-40 out of big cardboard boxes - complete with a Saran Wrap sliding canopy - and marked it up like Scotty's 'Old Exterminator'. I spent hours in that thing pretending I was up in the skies over Asia downing Japanese A6M Zeroes, dreaming of flying in a real P-40 some day. Fast forward 50+ years. In 2009, I had flown in 'Liberty Belle', a restored B-17 http://b17.transgalaxy.com/. In 2011, they were coming back to the area and bringing a P-40 along! I jumped on it and booked flights on both. |
To prepare,
I got a P-40E pilot's manual from http://www.zenosflightshop.com/.
I remember driving out to Aurora Municipal Airport with Christy and my copy of 'God Is My Co-Pilot' and the pilot's manual. We parked and walked over to the fence.
And there on the tarmac was not just ANY P-40, but one marked up like Scotty's bird and my cardboard box from half a century ago.
I about fell over. So my dream came true - to top it off it was in SCOTTY'S P-40. And the pilot (I kept calling him 'Scotty') had asked if I got motion sickness.
I replied HELL NO! So he filled it with all of the aerobatics I'd seen in the movie and imagined while flying my cardboard box, including going inverted a few times.
And I'd never experienced G-forces like that and probably won't ever again. |
We were scheduled to fly in 'Liberty Belle' but they were fixing the fuel system and she didn't go up that day.
The next day she took off for Indianapolis and ended up making an emergency landing in a cornfield and burning to the ground - REALLY sad.
All of the news reports called it a 'crash landing', but it wasn't!
Amazingly, the pilot put her down on all three wheels, everybody got out safely, and watched her burn cuz the cornfield was too muddy for the fire trucks.
https://abc7chicago.com/archive/8187278/ |
I have one of the limited edition "OLD EXTERMINATOR" lithographs pictured below, signed by the artist Ernie Boyette, and Colonel Scott!  |
NOTE: I still have some editing to finish...
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