THE SKY’S THE LIMIT : From Stealthy U-2 to Lumbering C-130, Reno Air Races Are Anything but a Flighty Affair

Lefty Gardner is 68 and still doing swooping loops and rolls in his P-38 Lightning, “White Lightnin’.”

Bob Hoover is 67. He may fly a jet or his yellow P-51 Mustang, “Ole Yeller,” upside down right into the next century, waggling his wings for the crowd.

They are two of the reasons the National Air Races have succeeded through their 26th year, along with younger generations of stunt flyers, wing walkers, sky divers, military fly-bys and all the other fascinations of flight that drew 148,000 to Stead Airport over four days last week. The stealthy U-2 was there, as was the lumbering C-130.

But what gets the blood rushing at Reno is what the regulars call the Unlimiteds, or the “big iron”--the modified World War II fighter planes with their enduring tug of raw power and nostalgia and admiration for those who flew them--who still fly them.

There are other air shows, even other races for the old T-6 military trainers and tiny biplane and Formula One classes. The vintage planes can be seen at almost any of them--blasts from the past roaring past the crowds, or just sitting on the ground to be touched with a curious reverence, or contemplated with misty eyes by those who remember them. Occasionally, under sponsorship as the “Air Camel Warbirds,” there are exhibition “races,” and there have been some financially disastrous attempts to race them seriously elsewhere over the years. But for the last quarter-century Reno is the only place they have raced for real, year in and year out.

They aren’t shipped in. Their pilots fly them here. Wouldn’t have it any other way. There were about three dozen at Reno, most from Southern California.

Mustangs, F8F Bearcats, F2G Corsairs, British Sea Furys, even a couple of Russian Yak 11s, and Gardner’s P-38--anything that flew fast with only propellers to drive it. Jets are of another generation.

THE PILOTS

There won’t be any “after the war” for a fighter pilot.

--Raoul Lufberry, c. 1917

Wrong. For those who were lucky.

Hoover’s Spitfire was shot down by a German FW-190 over the Mediterranean, and he spent 15 1/2 months in a Baltic prison camp before going over the fence two weeks before the war ended.

Gardner flew 46 B-17 missions over Germany and some secret missions into Sweden, delivering guns for the freedom fighters in Nazi-occupied Norway.

Lyle Shelton, 56, of Granada Hills was a Navy carrier pilot but fell into the crack between WWII and Korea and missed both shows.

“I flew the last of the big propeller airplanes with the Navy--the AD Skyraider,” Shelton said. “One of the reasons I got out was they wouldn’t send me over (to Korea) in a combat squadron.

“But, looking back at it, I’m damn glad I didn’t, ‘cause I could have got shot down like a lot of my friends did.”

The average age of the Warbird pilots is 46. Are these just a bunch of old men playing “Top Gun” in their mid-life crises?

Hardly. For most, flying is their profession. Gardner was a cropduster. Hoover does shows. Shelton is a captain for a commercial airliner. Hoover doesn’t race anymore, and Gardner doesn’t push his P-38 to its limits because it’s one of the last of the breed. But Shelton has won the Reno event the last two years and last month at Las Vegas, N.M., set a world three-kilometer piston engine speed record of 528.329 m.p.h. in his Bearcat “Rare Bear” that he keeps at the Van Nuys Airport.

At Stead, a former military base in the desert highlands 10 miles north of Reno, the Unlimiteds race around a nine-mile course marked by pylons, reaching speeds close to 500 m.p.h.

“It’s an intensely demanding and hostile environment,” Shelton said. “It’s hot in the cockpit from the engine and exhaust. Flying as fast as we do, to run up front takes all the concentration you can get, and it’s still not enough. You need to be totally visual, yet you have to be aware of your engine temperatures . . . so I don’t get too hot . . . (and) blow my engine.

“It’s avoiding other traffic at 800 feet a second, 25 to 75 feet height. And then you’re pulling those G’s--an easy five--in the turns. I’m scanning up the course for the second or third pylon ahead and visualizing my line . . . factoring in the traffic and the propwash. (Propwash) is bad. It can kill you.”

Should people his age be doing this?

“We’re a bunch of oldies,” Shelton concedes. “It takes so much money to do it, a guy’s gotta have a pretty good job. But I’ve found that once I get on the course, that adrenaline pumps the same way it did 30 years ago.

“Also, I anticipate things better than I used to. I’ve made all the mistakes there are to be made. I keep a little margin there. I don’t fly high, but I don’t stick it right on the deck. Sometimes the new guys will try to fly low to impress somebody how good they are.”

Shelton once did that, too.

“I’ve done cropdusting, flown under telephone lines and bridges. I’ve done all that.”

One aficionado of flying said that Hoover “has crashed more planes than anyone alive”--with the emphasis on alive.

Test pilot, stunt pilot, combat pilot, racing pilot--there is hardly anything with wings he wouldn’t try to fly, including the X-1 rocket plane as a backup to Chuck Yeager, and last week he was zooming through the sky over Stead in an Evergreen Aviation executive twin-jet Sabreliner, trailing show smoke and pulling several G’s, which stands for gravity, not geriatrics.

Hoover, tall, lean and mustachioed, says he has no idea how many hours he has flown. He hasn’t raced seriously since the Reno races started in ’64 and he was asked to serve as official starter and pace plane pilot for the Unlimiteds.

But it would appear he hasn’t stopped taking chances. A few years ago, just for fun, he flew the Reno course in an F-86 Sabrejet at 622 m.p.h. Shelton’s winning average speed this year was 450.910, slightly off his record of 456.821 of a year ago.

Old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots?

“I’m not bold, just old,” Hoover says. “You have to realize I know the limits on those airplanes--what they can take from a flight test viewpoint--and I stay within those limits, and I stay within my own limits. If you honor each of those you can last a long time.”

A few of the pilots are younger than the planes they fly. Delta pilot Rick Brickert, 34, of Salt Lake City, won at Reno in 1986 and was runner-up to Shelton in his Sea Fury this year. He doesn’t worry about the old guys.

“Everybody’s reflexes start slowing down when you’re about 15, I think,” Brickert said. “But when you lose your reflexes you gain experience, and experience is more important.”

The youngest pilot is John Maloney, 28, of Corona Del Mar, whose family runs the Planes of Fame museum at the Chino airport where there are 125 Warbirds, including 30 that fly.

Maloney flew a Supercorsair to third place this year, but nostalgia had nothing to do with it.

“A Cessna’s fine when you’re just learning to fly,” he said, “but when you start flying one of these you don’t want to go back. They’re built real well, stronger . . . made to fight.

“It’s kind of a turn-on for us when people who flew ‘em during the war come by and tell us their stories.”

THE PLANES

“ . . . Fit their light silken wings and skim the buxom air.”

--Richard Owen Cambridge, 1751

Right after the war you could have bought a used Mustang for as little as $300. These days a good one could cost $450,000--although the price may drop after last week’s races, when a Bearcat, Sea Fury, Corsair, Yak and custom-built Tsunami left the Mustangs behind in the championship final race.

All of the lead planes were powered by radial engines, which run cooler and under less load and are therefore more reliable. Bill Destefani of Bakersfield, in his red Mustang “Strega,” pushed Shelton for 5 1/2 of the eight laps before he had to drop out.

Otherwise, the planes generally are in better flying condition than when they came off the wartime assembly lines. They not only are almost completely rebuilt but receive loving care from a seemingly limitless pool of volunteer labor instead of grumbling, homesick conscripts.

A lot of war buffs say the Mustang, the first to provide bombers long-range cover over Germany, was the best fighter plane in the war. Others disagree.

Gardner prefers the twin-tailed, twin-engined P-38, once it was modified with dive flaps and better engines.

Shelton swears by the Bearcat. Built by Grumman, it actually just missed the war, as he did.

“The very first squadron that was outfitted with them was headed for Japan on the (aircraft carrier) Boxer, just out of Hawaii westbound, on VJ Day. Had these Bearcats gotten into the war, there would have been slaughter. The stock Bearcat was a far superior fighter over the P-51, for example. It climbs better, turns better and goes just as fast.

“Then by the time Korea came along, everybody was going to jets.”

THE FUTURE

“The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul.”

--Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh: War in the Air, 1922

What happens to the racing when the Warbirds--men and machines--all wear out? Steve Hinton of Chino flew John Sandberg’s custom Tsunami to fifth place at Reno, but the project has cost more than a million dollars and hardly seems a practical alternative.

As it is, it costs about $150,000 to keep a plane just for one event a year, and the prize money at Reno doesn’t come close to paying expenses. Last year Shelton won $58,000, including contingency money from sponsors, and he came out about the same this year.

One hope may be Air Racing Unlimited Inc.

Chris Pook, who created the Long Beach Grand Prix, has brought the Unlimited pilots under his umbrella organization, Race Circuit Management, which also runs the Camel Grand Prix of Southern California IMSA races at Del Mar. Pook is looking to establish an Air Camel Warbirds series of races at Denver, Dallas and Indianapolis.

“If we can get two of the three sites scheduled, we’d like to do it next year,” Pook said.

Thornton Audrain, executive director of the Reno Air Racing Assn., which stages the nationals each year, said: “We’re not a part of that, but we’d be very supportive. If they can get it going it will be good for all of us. To get sponsors involved, we have to have more than one race.”

Reno’s is a nonprofit operation run by 3,000 volunteers, with proceeds from concessions going to community projects. Gate receipts, after expenses, are used to buy land to protect the future of its event against the encroachment of developers. They need 19 square miles for an Unlimited course and have obtained agreements with the Bureau of Land Management and private owners for the rest.

Destefani, one of the pilots, said: “We’d like this to be the Indianapolis (500)--the final championship race.”

Reno, after all, isn’t as much a race as it is a reunion--a place for old planes and old pilots to get together.