Low Altitude, High Anxiety : Air racing: Flying a single-propeller airplane a few feet off the ground actually appeals to daredevil Lyle Shelton.

The old, old plane came out of the sky in silence, its engines dead and its pilot thinking seriously that he might momentarily be joining them. In a violent eruption of dust he brought the plane hard against the desert floor, sending a shower of sand, cactus and mulched mesquite bushes high into the air seconds before it crashed through two barbed-wire fences and two deep ravines and came to a sudden, jarring halt in a small ditch.

The veteran commercial airline pilot emerged from the cockpit with only a scratch or two. He then walked across the desert to the nearest road, flagged down a passing bus, made his way to nearby Albuquerque, N. M., caught the next flight back to Los Angeles and just hours later, early the next morning, was in front of the instrument panel of a jumbo jet winging eastward toward Washington, D. C.

“That was hairy,” said the pilot, Lyle Shelton, 57, of Granada Hills. “You can bust it doing that kind of stuff.”

The good news for those who fly only with great reluctance, and even then only under heavy sedation, is the plane that Shelton turned into a weed-whacker that day in 1971 was not a commercial plane. It was his own, a sparkling, single-prop F8F-2 Grumman Bearcat with, luckily, just one seat.

Guiding a computer-flown, 350-seat conference room with wings bolted onto it across the country at an altitude of 42,000 feet is Shelton’s job.

Blasting the 3,800-horsepower Bearcat over the ground at 500 m.p.h. at virtually no altitude at all--so low that he can muss the fur of a weasel with the tires--now that’s flying.

“Commercial flying is a whole different ballgame,” Shelton said. “It can get competitive, trying to make a better landing than another pilot and that kind of thing. But air racing, well that’s a one-man show. And even though we try to be safety-oriented, basically, racing these old planes is a dangerous deal. You can get killed in a whole lot of different ways. You try to make it safe, but just by its nature, air racing is a really dangerous sport.”

Never has that been pounded home more graphically than in the past few years, thanks to the advent of the home video camera. Several times a year, a Sunday night TV broadcast will show graphic home video footage of a vintage plane slamming to earth in a ball of flame at a weekend air race or air show.

But while there are only so many things a person can do to make such sport safer, there are hundreds of ways to make the plane go faster.

For Shelton, that is the magic.

In September, he became the first pilot to win three consecutive national air-race championships, taking the unlimited class title in Reno, Nev., and setting a national record in the process as he took the copper and white Bearcat around the 9.1-mile desert course at 468.620 m.p.h.

At that speed, with a giant three-blade propeller slashing through the air so close to the ground, it is, spectators report, a feeling that cannot be described, although a few have tried.

“One guy told me the Bearcat makes so much noise and vibration as it passes by that he looked down to see if it had untied his shoelaces,” said Bill Kelly, a crop-dusting pilot from Ft. Pierre, S. D., and one of dozens of volunteers in Shelton’s Bearcat program.

It was Kelly who undertook the mission in 1975 to transform safe and sane commercial airline Capt. Shelton into a man who would try to fly a plane under a shrub at ridiculous speeds.

“Lyle contacted me when he got serious about air racing,” Kelly said. “He wanted some ground time. Flying at 40,000 feet is not really flying. Four feet, that’s flying. Lyle wanted that experience of flying low. At first, we bring it down to 10 feet. From there we progress to one foot off the ground. Or less.

“You’re not doing this thing right at all if you don’t run the wheels right into the wheat once in a while.”

Shelton, a carrier pilot in the Navy whose flying career began too late for the Korean War and ended before the Vietnam War, found the Bearcat--a fighter plane that was built toward the end of WWII and missed that war--in a field in Valparaiso, Ind., in 1968.

Well, he found what used to be a Grumman Bearcat. This one had crashed, and for $2,500 Shelton took possession of the fuselage, landing gear and one wing panel.

“Wasn’t much of it left, really,” Shelton said. “It wasn’t really any airplane at all anymore.”

But with his passion back in California via truck, Shelton got to work.

“I made calls and found every wrecked Bearcat in the country,” he said. “When I’d hear through the pilots’ grapevine of a Bearcat crash someplace, I was there in the morning, buying parts. If I got there quick, they’d sell me anything I wanted. They were just glad to be alive.”

With a lot of money and even more help assembling the craft, the Bearcat that seemingly had died in a field in Indiana had been brought back to life. “We had it flying in nine months,” Shelton said.

With only two test flights under its wings, the Bearcat went to Reno for the first time and Shelton finished fifth in that year’s unlimited race at a speed of 356 m.p.h. The next year, with many modifications, the Bearcat flew in the Reno races again.

Briefly.

On the first lap of the race the engine smoked and Shelton was forced quickly to the ground where the plane sustained some damage but the pilot did not.

In 1973, however, the Bearcat was perfect and Shelton won three races, including the national championships held in Reno. Shelton’s success continued, and his national titles in 1988, 1989 and 1990 have stamped him and his Bearcat as the best in the air. First prize this year was $58,000.

It might never have happened. He had his mind set on a long career in the Navy, which would have precluded the heavy investment in time and money that air racing requires. But the only thing he really loved about being in the Navy was flying, and when he was informed in 1965 that his flying career of a decade was winding down, he got out.

“I found out then that the Navy is about boats,” Shelton said. “They let you fly the jets for a few years, but then they want you to learn how to drive a boat. I didn’t want to be a boat driver.”

Twenty-five years later, it appears to have been a good decision. After financing the Bearcat for many years out of his own pocket--to the tune of about $100,000 a year--Shelton has acquired sponsorship for his air racing. Jack DeBoer, a hotel builder from Wichita, Kan., jumped aboard the Bearcat bandwagon three years ago and has made Shelton’s life a lot easier.

Not easy. Just easier.

“There’s nothing else quite like flying this plane,” Shelton said recently as he admired the 8,000-pound craft in its hangar at the Van Nuys Airport. “It’s just such a thrill. The adrenaline gets going and you’re coming after it at 500 miles an hour, just 35 feet or less off the ground, and the noise and vibration is so great it becomes a physical force.

“And I know it’s dangerous. When you’re flying that speed at that altitude, going like a bat out of hell just off the ground, if anything screws up you know you’re going to be on the ground real quick.

“It is, without question, a very hostile environment.”