PIE IN THE SKY : When John Bowman’s Dream Took a Hammerhead Turn, His Career With the Red Baron Squadron Took Off--in the Direction of the El Toro Air Show

Biplane pilot John Bowman is one of the very few people who actually got to grow up to fulfill his childhood dream. His dream, however, had nothing to do with flying or with performing vertigo-inducing aerobatics with such names as the Hammerhead Turn.

“I never even flew a plane until I was 30,” says the 47-year-old onetime Los Angeles Times paperboy. “When I was a kid I wanted to be a policeman, and that’s what I became for three years in Long Beach. And even during the first six years I was flying, if people asked if I did aerobatics, my standard response was, ‘Well, I don’t stand on my head, and I don’t see any reason why I should fly upside down.’

“I’ve got to tell you, though, once you start barnstorming, it just gets in your blood, and you wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

As lead pilot for the Red Baron Stearman Squadron--one of the precision aerobatics teams performing at the El Toro Air Show on Saturday and Sunday--Bowman certainly gets in his share of flying. He estimates his modified World War II-vintage Stearman A-75 biplane rises off the runway some 1,000 times a year, and, fortunately, lands the exact same number of times. That’s not a guaranteed thing--friends of his in the air show business have met their deaths while performing, when an instant’s mistake can take out both your plane and those around it.

Talking by phone from a New Mexico airfield last week, Bowman said: “Of course, it hurts all of us to lose one of us like that, but it hasn’t given me second thoughts about doing this. The pilot always looks at the other guy who has had a misfortune and goes, ‘Well, he made a mistake’ or ‘Something happened where there was just no way out of it.’ You always just hope that sort of thing doesn’t happen to you.”

To be executing blood-draining loops and rolls in the close company of three other pilots, he said, “requires an explicit trust between us. That comes with the hours and hours of flying together and the practice. We’re pretty good friends, but it’s more like being family than friends, because we spend more time with each other--some 180 days a year--than we actually do with our families during the flying season.”

Bowman does have a wife and children and says they came to terms with his line of work a long time ago. “They understand the nature of my job and how I feel about it and the precision of what I do,” he said. “They understand that it’s no more dangerous than I make it.”

He doesn’t refer to the Red Baron Stearman Squadron’s aerial routines as “stunts” but as “formation aerobatics.”

“They aren’t stunts because we always try to leave ourselves an out in case something goes wrong; we’re not intentionally up there defying death. You don’t have time to worry up there; you’re just always aware of what the possibilities are and what your escape is going to be. As long as you have that, then you have Murphy covered (Murphy being Murphy’s Law, which states that if something can go wrong, it will). The instant you forget Murphy is when he’s going to reach up and smack ya.”

The Red Baron Stearman Squadron--formed and maintained to promote Red Baron frozen pizza--is performing at 18 air shows this year, including the El Toro debut. One of the group’s flashier aerobatic displays is the aforementioned Hammerhead turn, which entails a plane making a straight-up ascent, rolling onto its back, making a loop and heading straight down. During such times the pilots’ concerns include staying conscious as the G-force is draining the blood from their brains. (One trick to keeping the stuff where it belongs, Bowman said, is to tense your thigh and stomach muscles, a hint that can also come in handy when undergoing the steep takeoffs at John Wayne Airport.)

When they aren’t doing air shows, the pilots are kept busy giving Red Baron’s clients rides in the two-seater, open-cockpit airplanes. The open cockpit occasionally comes in handy, as passengers do sometimes lose their pizza while flying.

The Stearmans are hangared in Marshall, Minn. The seven pilots--only four of whom fly at any one time--all live in different states, with Bowman presently residing in Colorado. His fellow fliers at the El Toro show will be Steve Thompson flying left wing, Randy Drake flying right wing, and Jim (Sonny) Lovelace flying the slot position. Bowman said the Squadron’s narrator, Jerry Van Kempen, “is really 50% of our show. He has a voice that sounds like a cartoon character, and he’s like an old-timey carny barker, which he has been.”

Bowman opted out of his original dream job as a policeman, he said, because “I was somewhat disillusioned by the fact that all the people you meet are sore, either because they’ve just had a crime committed against them or they’re being arrested for one. And I wanted to make people happy.”

He made a “180-degree turn” to become a country rock bar musician for several years. He started flying in 1975 and got a job at an airport pumping gas and towing gliders. Later he became an instructor and did airborne traffic reports for a Denver radio station. He had no interest in aerobatic flying until his boss needed an instructor.

“The instant I started doing it I thought, ‘This is great!’ It was a lot different than I thought it would be, not like standing on your head at all,” he said.

Interested in vintage craft, he began hanging out at a restoration shop, “drooling on their planes.” Sometimes they let him fly the planes, including a Stearman. They later told him of a job flying a Stearman for a pizza company towing banners.

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ They said, ‘Well, it’s a toll-free number.’ So I called and here I am.”

In the 11 years he’s been flying for Red Baron, he’s found that “the civil air-show pilots are like a big happy family. I’m really surprised at the similarities between the air show and rock music industries, in the camaraderie between the performers, and in the gypsy lifestyle traveling around, though obviously the pilots aren’t into drugs.”

There even are groupies, in a sense.

“The groupies are middle-aged men, generally. You can see them coming, these guys who flew these airplanes during World War II. You watch this old geezer walk up to the airplane with a tear in his eye, and you know it’s another one, that the next thing out of his mouth will be, ‘I flew these things back in 1943.’ Then he’ll say something dumb like, ‘You know, it used to get cold up there back then,’ ” Bowman said, laughing.

The Stearman was the most common training plane of World War II for both the Army Air Corps and the Navy. Some 2,500 are still extant in varying states of repair, according to the Stearman Restorers Assn., which believes that 1,200 to 1,500 of those may still be flyable. Some are still used as crop dusters, but “most of them are hangar queens now,” Bowman said. “They don’t really get to fly much.”

By contrast, the Red Baron Stearmans see constant use. They are maintained by a team of mechanics and an in-house fabrication shop to replace parts. On some planes, Bowman said, the only stock part is the original fuselage. The aircraft have been beefed up with 450-horsepower engines (twice the planes’ original power) and fitted with fuel and oil systems that will function upside down.

To Bowman, “Flying these planes really generates a nostalgia for an older America, for that time after the First World War when people came back from the war interested in aviation, and there wasn’t much being done commercially. The pilots didn’t have set work to do, so they’d fly from town to town, landing in farm fields--which I think is where the term ‘barnstormer’ comes from--and give rides and put on impromptu air shows. I like being a part of that tradition.”

At an air show such as the one in El Toro, which promises a simulated bombardment with screaming jets, half a ton of explosives and 2,000 gallons of burning gasoline, what does Bowman think the appeal of his low-tech planes will be?

“Well, in the first place, it’s peaceful. The airplanes make a lot of noise and smoke, but it’s old-timey. It’s kind of a good-time deal rather than ‘Let’s see what we can blow up.’ I think the military demonstrations really have their place--for one thing it allows the public to see this hardware we spend so many millions of dollars on--but for me it’s hard to compete with the nostalgia and feeling you get from these old open-cockpit tail-draggers.”

What: The Red Baron Stearman Squadron, a precision aerobatics team performing in the El Toro Air Show.

When: Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26, at 1 p.m.

Where: The El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Whereabouts: From the San Diego (405) Freeway take the Sand Canyon Avenue exit and head east following the signs to the base.

Wherewithal: Admission and parking are free.

Where to call: (714) 726-2100.