Star Pupil Under a Veteran’s Wing : Mentor, Ex-TWA Captain, Gives Lofty Rating to Pilot, 20

For fortunate youngsters--among them Australian teen-ager Rod Laver and a London choirboy named Laurence Olivier--there have been discerning elders. For Shana Karam, 20, there is Bob Van Ausdell, 64. . . .

He’s a grand old artisan of the air. She’s a beginning pilot. But he says she’s got it. The Touch. Better, he believes, than Amelia Earhart and Jacqueline Cochran, who were adventuring feminists first and aviators second. Superior, he suspects, to Wiley Post, Yeager, Rickenbaker, Lindbergh and other legends of brilliant yet mechanical flying skills.

“The Touch is absolute, complete, perfect control of an airplane,” explained Van Ausdell, an accredited airline, combat and air show pilot for almost half a century. “It is being a precision pilot constantly searching for zero tolerances. It is flying all traffic patterns, all approaches and all landings in a perfect attitude all the time. That’s how Karam flies.

“I’ve seen it before . . . but damned seldom in a man . . . and never in a woman.”

On the strength and inspiration of all that, retired TWA captain Van Ausdell has become a patron while active Santa Paula Airport bum Karam has agreed to be his protege.

From Transports to Home-Builts

And for aviation sexists who might think a female flier’s place most definitely is not in his hangar:

--Karam, while in her teens, had flown more than 63 types of aircraft, from vintage military transports to single-seat home-builts.

--She once performed a series of spins in a Ryan PT-22, a World War II primary trainer, as a personal test of her resistance to dizziness, nausea and disorientation. Thirty-three consecutive spins, to be exact.

--As a member of the Confederate Air Force, a worldwide organization dedicated to the preservation and flying of World War II airplanes, she has been checked out in a replica Japanese Zero, co-piloted a twin-engined C-46 transport and is qualified to fly in the organization’s annual air show.

--Van Ausdell has spent 11 years restoring to pristine condition a Staggerwing Beech cabin biplane. The 1944 classic is worth at least $150,000. Only two other pilots are allowed to fly his primrose yellow treasure. Karam is one.

--In February, after only two hours of familiarization flight with Lockheed test pilot Skip Holm, Karam was performing solo aerobatics in a P-51 Mustang. That’s a 430-m.p.h. World War II fighter. “The Lord put some people on the face of the Earth to be pilots, and she (Karam) is one of them,” declared Joe Kasparoff, president of a Montebello aerospace firm and owner of the restored, feisty, venerable, $240,000 Mustang. “It (Karam’s flight) was absolutely magnificent. All her procedures, takeoffs and landings were textbook.”

There is, clearly, an inheritence here. Karam’s parents, although divorced since she was a babe, are pilots. Mother flew for pleasure, father flew the Alaskan bush. From Dad, says Karam, came an aviation experience that was close to spiritual.

‘Just Natural’

“It was my first flight,” recalled Karam. “I was about 11 years old, visiting my Dad, and we went flying in a Cessna 172. The day was light rain and patchy cumulus clouds. . . . He asked me if I wanted to fly the airplane. . . . I just put my hands on the yoke and immediately there was this eerie feeling.

“It was like I had done it all before, like I’d always been able to fly. When the wings banked it was just natural to move the controls the other way to bring them back. No overcorrecting, no violent maneuvers. The airplane just stayed where it was.

“It was an incredible thrill, a tingle, something I will never forget. That day, the airplane, the intense exhilaration.”

The bug that bit, then dined on Karam’s soul, also munched every other interest in her young life. At an age when she should have been hanging out at gallerias, Karam was haunting airports. School homework was whatever history and English could be crammed between books on aerodynamics and navigation. One of her high school term papers was on the P-51 Mustang. Odd jobs meant money for flying lessons.

And at 15, from Santa Ynez Airport, Karam soloed a Bellanca Scout. Two years later, scrounging rides and working to buy advanced instruction represented all her spare time, and that’s how Karam happened to be flying from Santa Paula that Saturday in a 40-year-old, 65-horsepower, tail-dragging Aeronca Champ. . . .

Touch-and-go. That’s the name of the exercise. Touchdown, rollout, and go again. Takeoffs and landings by the dozen. Over and over to establish rote within instinct. Again and again until a polish appears.

“I was really fascinated by the way this airplane was being handled,” remembered Van Ausdell. “The traffic patterns and approaches were perfect, identical. Always landing on the same spot, no bounces, nice power-off approaches without variations . . . and the airplane landing in a perfect attitude without even a squeak from those little wheels.

“I started hiding behind trucks and peering around gas pumps just to watch. I had to find out who this pilot was and where this talent came from.”

Van Ausdell eventually introduced himself. Karam, in turn, was introduced to his world and past. It includes aviation experiences from flying B-25 bombers in the South Pacific during World War II to piloting L-1011 TriStars for TWA. There was his restoration of the Staggerwing; a deep involvement with the Confederate Air Force, its warbirds and their pilots; also a long, close friendship with super-selling aviation author Ernest K. Gann.

Most important, Van Ausdell also had retirement time to invest in teaching, counseling and counter-balancing what he has recognized as Karam’s “judgment calls, knocking off the airshow tendencies . . . all the stuff that any red-blooded 20-year-old American wants to do in an airplane.”

A Selfishness

There is, of course, a selfishness here. Van Ausdell admits it. He has three adult children from a marriage that ended years ago and none was interested in flying. That has left him with almost 50 years of aviation wisdom in search of a final purpose.

Then along came this kid with what could be the major syndromes of aviation genius . . . talent, passion, hunger and a dedication to perfection. And Van Ausdell entered his second fatherhood.

“Sure, I sort of adopted her as my daughter,” he acknowledged. “She represented an opportunity to impart some of my knowledge, to give her every chance in aviation I could, to possibly show her the way and to open a few doors.”

By coincidence, Karam has been short one full-time father since her parents separated and by 17 the desire for a dad’s guidance had become pretty critical.

“He (Van Ausdell) is one of the special things that has happened in my life,” Karam said. “He’s one of the few people who enjoy just sitting at an airport grading landings.

“I’m just amazed by his talent and so grateful for his attention. If it weren’t for him, I’d still be on my back wiping oil off airplanes. I hope that one day I’ll be in a position to do for someone what he has done for me.

“Yeah, it’s a good father-daughter relationship.”

It was father Van Ausdell who checked daughter Shana out in the precious Staggerwing. But it was Daughter who flew Dad to an annual meeting of the Staggerwing Museum Foundation Inc. at Tullahoma, Tenn.

Like father like daughter. Van Ausdell proposed Karam for commissioning in the Texas-based Confederate Air Force. Like daughter like father. She rode as his co-pilot when he flew the CAF’s C-46 (a relic of World War II and airlifts over the China-Burma-India Hump) to a gathering of warbirds.

Van Ausdell organized Karam’s invitation to fly the Zero replica at the CAF’s annual air show in Harlingen, Tex. Karam told a writer for a CAF magazine that her real dream was to pilot a P-51 Mustang. And that story was read by Kasparoff in California, who promptly telephoned Karam and volunteered his P-51 Mustang to her dream and log book.

What a team. And what an airplane ride for Karam who paints the Mustang as “the most magnificent collection of nuts and bolts and cotter pins and sheet metal and engine ever put together.”

She prepared for the P-51 flight by burning the midnight wattage over the airplane’s technical manuals. Her practical primer was eight hours of intense schooling, dual and solo, in a T-6 trainer. Then came last-minute systems instructions and handling advice from test pilot Holm before that first solo takeoff from Van Nuys Airport.

‘Rolled Down Runway’

“We rolled down the runway, easy with the throttle, bringing it (power) up until the tail lifted . . . and at 110 (miles per hour) we lifted off. I thought I was in heaven, on top of the world. I did a couple of rolls, steep turns and lazy 8s . . . how that airplane loves to roll . . . and that bubble canopy. The view when you’re inverted is enough to bring tears to your eyes.”

Karam doesn’t actually talk about airplanes and flying.

She fizzes.

“If something happened that I couldn’t fly, then I wouldn’t want to live. It’s the thrill of being three-dimensional while looking at the world upside down, seeing the sun slanting through a cloud . . . in a Ryan, doing Lazy 8s, even an atheist might recognize the existence of God.

“I’m in love with the World War II era and with the airplanes that were built for speed, performance and, as luck would have it, they were beautiful. The sound of their engines, that Rolls-Royce Merlin, would wake me from a deep sleep 10 feet underground . . . that exhaust is ambrosia and I could sit back and gulp it.”

Such devotion doesn’t leave much room for any other commitment. Karam senses no fulfillment for her in marriage or children. Several serious relationships have faded before her symbiosis for flying, and the latest seems to be running into heavy turbulence.

Especially when he’s living in Hollister and she’s puttering above El Monte, Chino and the City of Industry earning $7 an hour towing advertising banners for an Orange County home builder.

It’s all part of the design.

“I want to do everything in aviation,” Karam insists. “Crop dust, fly for the movies, fly the mail, fly airliners, fly the Reno Air Races, do everything that can be done in aviation so that one day I can step into any airplane and be able to do anything.”

Meanwhile, there’s life to be lived and flight time to build and new skills to be absorbed and banter with Van Ausdell to lighten a youngster’s learning.

“My birthday?” repeated Karam. “Dec. 2, 1964.”

“I’ve got neckties older than that,” Van Ausdell growled.

“Yeah,” Karam ribbed, “the pink one with the airplanes that light up.”