Airplanes of the Stars
Show performers talk about their favorite rides.
- By Linda Shiner
- AirSpaceMag.com, May 01, 2008
Art Scholl's Chipmunk (center, with the red and white stripes and the leading edges of the wings painted blue) hangs in the Boeing Aviation Hangar at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F.Udvar-Hazy Center.
Dane Penland
When National Air and Space Museum docents tell visitors about the historic airplanes in the collection, they often draw on stories told by the people who know the airplanes best: the donors. Last year aeronautics curator Dorothy Cochrane invited airshow star Patty Wagstaff, performers Steve Oliver and Suzanne Asbury-Oliver, and Judy Scholl, wife of the late aerobatic showman Art Scholl, to give docents the inside scoop on three of the Museum's top-performing showplanes. Docents now have the following stories to add to their tours.
No one can accuse Walter Extra, who refused to sell it to her.
Wagstaff said the first time she saw a photo of the Extra 260, which was installed in the Museum in 1994, she knew she had to have it. She was competing in the 1988 World Aerobatic Championships in Red Deer, Canada. "I'd never seen an airplane like it," she said. "It was sleek and fast-looking, but it was a prototype and Walter said it wasn't built to withstand the rigors of hard-core aerobatics."
When Extra sold the prototype a year later to Brian Becker, who ran Pompano Air Center in Florida, Wagstaff bought the airplane from him. "I flew it every day, every day, every day," she said, smiling, to the assembled group of docents.
I saw her fly the 260 once, at Andrews Air Force Base in June 1993, her last demonstration before retiring the airplane. I still remember the performance. It was so crisp, yet so exuberant. The airplane, which has a roll rate of 360 degrees a second, appeared to dance with itself. I could almost hear a little "ta-daaaa!" at the end of each precisely executed, rollicking combination of rolls and climbs and tumbles and dives. But by that time, said Wagstaff, "Things were starting to [break] on it."
"Walter was absolutely right," she said. "It was underbuilt [for aerobatics]." Wagstaff had broken a longeron at an airshow in 1992, and when Museum staff took the airplane apart to hang it in 1994, they had a hard time getting the wing off because the spar bolts holding the wing on were bent.
"The 260 was so fast and had such a clean frontal area that it was really easy to over-G it," she said. "That's why it was breaking." The G meter on the aircraft, which is on display in the Pioneers of Flight gallery on the second floor of the Museum in Washington, is still set at 12 Gs, the last mark Wagstaff hit that day at Andrews.
Suspended from the ceiling of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia since the Center opened in 2003, Suzanne Asbury-Oliver's historic Travel Air D4D Pepsi Skywriter presides over the other showplanes. "I like seeing it way up high, looking down on everybody else, because that's where we did our work—up around 10,000 feet," Oliver told the docents. The "we" refers to her and the airplane, and the work: one of the rarest occupations in the world. "How many skywriters are there today?" an audience member asked. "You're looking at 'em," Oliver answered.
Comments (1)
I once flew a check ride with Jack Strayer in a Lake Amphibian. He showed me how to do ocean landings which are tough and scary to do, and I'm not sure I felt more competent after the ride. But the amazing thing after taking off from some fairly impressive waves was that we made the takeoff with the mixture mistakenly pulled back to 50%--the plane really shouldn't have been flying, but Jack just jerked it off a wave and we were flying. But I was most impressed when I learned that Jack also took Lindbergh for a check ride, about 30 or 40 years earlier. Nice company!
Posted by Mickey Davis on January 28,2009 | 12:05 PM