Remembering ‘the Greatest Fighter Plane in the World’ : Aircraft: Jean-Luc Beghin first saw the P-51 Mustang in the skies over Europe during World War II. Thus began a love affair that has lasted 46 years.

Though 46 years have passed, the moment remains vivid to Jean-Luc Beghin. He can still see the planes chasing each other in the skies over war-torn Brussels. The German plane, he remembers, was dark and menacing. The other, an American fighter, its engine thundering, was brightly decorated with huge white stars on its wings and fuselage.

“It was a dogfight,” Beghin says of that spring day in 1944. “I was in kindergarten and all the kids wanted to watch.”

Beghin does not remember much about the German plane. “I was only 5 years old at the time,” he explains. But he recalls every detail about the American fighter and especially the words of one teacher who joined her students staring up at the sky. “I remember her saying, ‘That’s a Mustang.’ ”

The P-51 Mustang. Just the name brings a smile to Beghin. For it was, he says, more than a fighter plane. It was a symbol. Proud. Flashy. Powerful. “It was my image of America,” he says.

Today, Beghin lives in Westchester, only a mile or so from the former North American Aviation plant where the P-51 was born and built. And Beghin is among those celebrating the 50th anniversary today of the fighter’s first test flight over Inglewood.

The 51-year-old artist is completing a pen-and-ink rendition of the aircraft’s cockpit for the French aviation magazine, Info Pilote. The publication’s six-page tribute to the P-51 will be among many celebrations worldwide, including air shows and exhibits this weekend from Santa Maria, Calif., to Duxforth, England.

But none of the anniversary tributes will be any more personal than Beghin’s. For the P-51 Mustang inspired Beghin as a boy and launched a love affair with aviation that continues today, particularly in his pen-and-ink drawings of aircraft.

“It is my main purpose in life,” he says.

From his days as an aviation illustrator for the Belgian Air Force to his employment today as a flight coordinator for Air France, Beghin’s life has revolved around aviation.

His works, displayed at the Smithsonian Institution and NASA’s Houston Museum, depict aircraft subjects ranging from Charles Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” to the Apollo cockpit. In all, about 20 renderings by Beghin have been commissioned for aviation exhibits and publications.

Now, those works will be joined by Beghin’s drawings of the P-51, an aircraft originally commissioned by the Royal Air Force only months before the United States joined World War II.

“In 1940, the British were short of fighter planes and came to North American Aviation, which had built the AT-6 trainer for England,” says Beghin, who has followed the P-51’s history since his youth.

Given four months to design and build a new fighter for England, the aircraft company (later absorbed by Rockwell International) unveiled the P-51 Mustang, a sleek, soaring aircraft faster than any fighter before it. Soon, the aircraft established itself as the finest American-built fighter used by the Royal Air Force.

By the time the United States began purchasing the fighters, the RAF had replaced the Mustangs’ unreliable first engines with 1,600-horsepower engines built by Rolls-Royce. Later, the same engines, built in the United States by Packard, were installed in the P-51s commissioned by the U.S. Army Air Corps.

The new engines allowed the P-51 a top speed of 487 miles an hour. And the addition of auxiliary fuel tanks extended its flying range enough for the aircraft to escort American bombers all the way from England to Berlin. Those bombers included the B-17, whose exploits have been popularized in the current movie, “Memphis Belle.”

“It became the greatest fighter plane in the world,” says Beghin.

After Germany unveiled the world’s first jet fighter, it was a P-51, flown by the soon-to-be-famous test pilot Chuck Yeager, that downed a Messerschmidt 262.

And of course, when Beghin was a boy, it was a P-51 that he remembers helping to liberate his homeland.

Over the years, he says, his fascination with the aircraft has never waned.

In 1981, he spoke with the P-51’s designer, Edgar Schmued, who lived in Rancho Palos Verdes and died in 1985. And two months ago, Beghin took his first flight in a P-51 during a trip to Paris. “When we took off, I had some tears in my eyes,” he says.

Someday, Beghin adds, he will finally finish a book on the P-51 Mustang. “I’ve been working on it for some time,” he says.

In the meantime, he will continue his drawings. And, he says, there are plenty of memories of the P-51 that will forever connect him to his youth.

Like the time, just after the war, when Beghin bought package after package of Belgium chocolate bars, just to collect an aviation history card of the P-51 Mustang. “Some of my friends had the card and I kept buying the chocolate just to get one. I don’t remember how many bars I finally ate,” he says.

Or the moment, after Belgium’s liberation in September, 1944, when Beghin got his first close look at one of the aircraft.

“They had a Mustang on display in the public square. I remember going up and touching the bare metal and seeing the plane up close. The bright colors and that white star.

“It was,” he says, “like Disneyland before its time.”