Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

It was a Tuesday morning at AirVenture, this past hot July. More specifically, it was Ben Bailey’s birthday. Ben, his wife Michelle, and I had flown out three days earlier in their Cirrus. We’d launched from Plymouth in the soup, dodged the red blotches on the miraculous radar downlink, and ended up, one pit-stop later, well ahead of sunset at Menominee, Michigan, just north of the Wisconsin border. Next day we drove down to Appleton and the comfortable Raddison Hotel. On previous AirVenture trips I’ve always stayed at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh dorms, world famous for threadbare towels, scratchy sheets, and zero cross ventilation. This life was better.

We first picked up Ben’s dad, attorney F. Lee Bailey, at the Appleton Airport, along with his pilot. Then we drove to the Hilton, at the northwest corner of AirVenture’s Witman Field, to have breakfast with Bob Hoover. How do you top that? Lee had defended Bob when the FAA came after his medical. I hadn’t met Lee before. My first impression is that he’s a believer in long hauls and short visits. I gathered he was due in Jamaica for dinner.

Hoover was waiting for us at the breakfast buffet, holding a table. He was, in this room full of pilots, the number one luminary. It didn’t matter that Harrison Ford was skulking around, or that Carroll Shelby, the creator of the Cobra sports car, my obsession senior year in high school, was just finishing his coffee. Bob was the singularity. You could imagine yourself as a movie star, or as a car designer, or for that matter as a defense attorney. Those are mortal lives. But could you really imagine yourself as Bob Hoover, escaping from a German POW camp, or landing a bizarrely out of control F-86 at an impossible 240 knots, or casually shutting down both engines on the Shrike Commander as part of your airshow routine? Not so easy.

After we sat down to eat, Ben mentioned that Bob had known my Dad, also Bill Crawford. I wasn’t sure how this would play, since we were going back some, but Bob nodded, “Yes, I knew him well. He liked to fly that push-me, pull-you airplane, didn’t he?” So we talked about Cessna Skymasters, and how you first opened the throttle on the rear engine on takeoff, just to make sure it was participating. Dad and Bob were connected through North American Rockwell. Dad also liked Aero Commanders. He was in a position to fly with Bob, if he’d wanted, but I’m sure never did. Dad couldn’t bring himself to believe that flying upside down was such a hot idea, and anyway if he had flown with Hoover I’d never have heard the end of it. Even so, Bob remembered my Dad first off as a pilot. Dad would have liked that. It meant the world to me.

After breakfast, we crammed ourselves into Bob’s rental and he drove us next door to the hangar where the airshow airplanes were kept. Ben, who loves AirVenture as much as anyone and doesn’t particularly mind being at the center of things, confided that the birthday was coming along nicely. We schmoozed with the performers for a while, and then headed over to the AirVenture grounds.

If you’ve been there, maybe you know the gate near the warbird area. As Bob drove up, a boy of perhaps sixteen stopped us to check our wristband passes. Bob didn’t have one. The boy said he’d have to get one. Bob said he usually just drove on in and typically didn’t need one. The boy said that’s the rules. It’s important to point out here that Bob Hoover really looks like Bob Hoover, and invariably dresses like Bob Hoover. If you’ve seen him once, as most AirVenture veterans have, you can forever pick him out of the line-up. If you’ve seen him fly, you know to wave him on through. But the boy was unyielding. Ben and Michelle traded expressions. Lee kept his wrists down. Then, without mentioning who he was or even intimating as to his place in the great sweep of aviation history, Bob courteously surrendered. He backed the car to the side and we tumbled out.

It happens that sometimes your universe collapses, as mine was about to do. As it re-inflates, one’s assumptions become a touch more critical. Contact with the young can be especially dangerous. When Bob and Lee walked back to buy passes, I approached the boy. In my friendliest avuncular manner, I told him he had a great story for his grandchildren. He’d barred from admission to AirVenture the beloved Bob Hoover, the man flying chase when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. But the boy just looked at me with the inflexible expression of someone for whom crowd control might indeed be life’s calling. “Sir, everyone needs a wristband. Who’s Chuck Yeager?”