Mustang-- It’s Love at First Flight

Men bring their pasts to Chino Municipal Airport. To feel and refly the aluminum and checkerboard-nosed fighters of their quicker days. Just one more time. While there is time.

Others bring youth. They want to imagine what World War II dogfighting was like. To wonder if they had whatever visceral overdose came with aces like Chuck Yeager and Gabe Gabreski.

Most, men and women, just want to know aviation history, to be able to say they flew in an immortal airplane and buzzed a ridge, then rolled upside down at 250 knots.

“Kids. Airline pilots. Professionals. People who save for a year. Racers from Riverside. An electrician who kept coming back until he’d flown in everything we had.”

The speaker is John Maloney. He’s Mr. Roarke of a Fantasy Island called the Planes of Fame Museum here. His dad, Ed Maloney, owns the place. John is on the team that maintains and restores its airplanes and--for the price of membership and a donation to the museum--takes the eager and the petrified for warbird rides.

Nostalgia doesn’t come cheap. But then neither does the acquisition, rebuilding, insurance, gas, oil and daily maintenance of 44-year-old combat airplanes.

So museum membership is $25. The donation may be $275. Or more. “Especially,” noted Maloney, “if you ride in our T-33 jet trainer or the B-25 Mitchell bomber.”

But the favorites are the fighters. The P-47 Thunderbolt that Gabreski flew in Europe. The P-40 of the Flying Tigers. The F-4 Corsair of Black Sheep Boyington.

And the P-51 Mustang whose reputation still tussles with the British Spitfire as the greatest fighter aircraft ever built.

Choose, invited Maloney, your weapon. I picked the P-51.

Let it be known that I am no neophyte aviator. Although too young for World War II, I was in splendid shape for later years. Stick time has been motley, from Tiger Moths to a B-17. Right way up in a C-130. Upside down in an F-4.

But I have never known--beyond a short taxi to a tiedown beneath an anxious owner’s paranoid gaze--the P-51.

Look at this thing on the ramp. A slick whippet in 8th Air Force livery. Crystal-cut proportions. A stalker, a runner, a hit man.

I climbed in back. Maloney in front. Battery, on. Fuel boost, on. Maloney triggered the starter and a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine coughed and popped and began its lumpy chug from belch to backfire.

On the ground, the Mustang is nothing. It is noisy. Exhaust fumes snake into the cockpit.

On takeoff, the airplane seems overrated. The engine hasn’t settled into the whistling hymn we’ve heard overhead for 40 years. It is more of a cast-iron bawl. But in the air there is transition. The airplane smoothes into the howl of 1,400 supercharged horsepower. Control is quick, tight. It has to do with laminar flow wings and torque, but that’s pretty boring stuff.

The real romance is in flick-of-the-wrist rolls and a climb rate that drops a stomach to kneecap levels. Maloney, 1,000 hours into his affair with the P-51, knows and adores the airplane. So he plays, with gusto, with a verve reserved for retreads who demand such a ride.

Flick. Warrah. He’s got the airplane inverted above Santiago Peak. Trees down there are now up here. Braaah. Maloney rolls, a wing tip pointing down to trace a falcon’s path through Trabuco Canyon.

A sweet loop, and on pullout the Mustang quivers in its own burble. A four-point roll. A low, high-speed pass through a bare saddle. Pine trees rise above each wing tip. Now down and down until the airplane is flat and waltzing the surface of empty Lake Matthews.

Maloney’s arrival over Chino Airport is pure drama. He tugs back on the stick. Then over. The airplane pitches out and into the landing pattern. The stomach is pitched into your socks.

Maloney’s voice on the intercom: “Well, what do you think?” Say I: “I wish you’d put a stick back here.” Says Maloney: “Almost everybody wishes that.”

Planes of Fame Museum, Chino Municipal Airport. For flight information, call (714) 597-3514.