Air Faire means ‘smiles on kids’ faces’--and Wrong Way Corrigan

In 1984, two men in Hawthorne decided that airports and aerospace needed a boost.

They were concerned about criticism of general aviation airports, and they feared that young people might overlook aviation and aerospace as opportunities for careers.

So the two--Hawthorne Municipal Airport Administrator Bob Trimborn and veteran Northrop Corp. design engineer Leo Gay--started the Hawthorne Air Faire, an annual event that unfolds again this weekend at the airport.

While public relations may have been its genesis, the air show has become a complex display of the world of flight. Visitors can watch vintage military planes in fly-bys and then inspect them on the ground. This year’s planes include one of seven existing Marine F-7 Tiger Cat fighters, developed at the end of World War II, and two B-25 bombers--the kind Col. Jimmy Doolittle flew when he bombed the Japanese mainland shortly after Pearl Harbor.

Visitors to the show, expected to number 15,000 a day, may ask questions of aviation experts from three museums, fly radio-controlled airplanes and see how rockets are made. A computer will permit people to design their own dream airplanes.

On a more down-to-earth level, the fair offers a chili cook-off with 40 participants Saturday, a display of vintage automobiles from four car clubs Sunday, and a collection of food and novelty booths operated by local organizations to raise money.

Don’t try to fly your plane into the airport during fair hours--10 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days--as normal flying activities will be suspended.

The air show unfolds in an area rich in aviation history.

“Hawthorne is where Northrop was founded, and Northrop and the city have been together now for almost 50 years,” said Trimborn, explaining that the airport initially was built for Northrop.

The Northrop plant was the birthplace of many famous planes, he said, among them the YB-49 Flying Wing, an experimental bomber of the late 1940s that became extinct after the federal government favored another plane and destroyed the 12 YB-49s that had been made; and the World War II P-61 Black Widow, the world’s first night attack plane, whose radar could detect bombers and virtually halted nighttime enemy bombing.

Gay, who started with Northrop 26 years ago, gets the credit for recruiting many of the fair’s historic planes and cars and their owners through his widespread involvement in aviation and automotive history and hobby groups.

“These are all personal friends I’ve grown up with over the years who come out and donate their time,” he said. Northrop is providing the computerized plane design system, in which people follow a program, choose such things as the type of plane and the number of engines, and come out with a completed craft on a video screen. It was the hit of the Dayton International Air Show in Ohio in July, Gay said.

A coup this year is the first public showing in 48 years of the small, time-worn, single-engine Curtiss Robin that carried Douglas (Wrong Way) Corrigan from New York to Ireland in July, 1938. Corrigan was supposed to fly to California. Although he had been unsuccessfully seeking the federal government’s permission to fly the Atlantic, he still insists that it was a compass error that took him across the Atlantic and earned him his nickname.

Corrigan will taxi his plane down the runway at 10 a.m. both days and will be available for photos and autographs.

Gay said he contacted Corrigan through an aviation writer he knows and persuaded the pilot to let the airport’s Western Museum of Flight--Gay is the president of that organization--put the dismantled plane back together to display at the fair. “I told him no one is paid, and we all do it out of love,” Gay said.

The show’s theme is “Dreamers and Pioneers.” Special guests, besides Corrigan, will include Darryl G. Greenamyer, a Lockheed Aircraft test pilot who set the world speed record of 988 m.p.h. for a propeller-driven aircraft in 1977; Burt Rutan, designer of the Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world without refueling, and members of the Tuskegee Airmen, an organization of black aviators who served in the segregated Army Air Corps in World War II.

Airport administrator Trimborn said admission to the show is kept at $2 to make it a family event. “Our gratification is seeing smiles on kids’ faces and the family having a good time,” he said.