Normally they would have been in one of the VIP boxes down in front but Gene was doing a barbecue for the group he was with and they wouldn't let him do it in the box. So he'd brought his camp trailer and was doing the cooking up in the back. There wouldn't be much to do until the weekend as the box was empty on Friday anyway. Tom was going to join them on Saturday when a much bigger crowd would be there.
When the plane went out of control Gene said it looked like it was coming straight down at him and he had a split second to think of running, but even in that split second he knew he didn't have the time to run anywhere. If it was going to hit him it was going to hit him. Right afterward Chris ran down to the crash site. Gene started to follow a few minutes later but Chris was already on his way back and told him not to go down, body parts were everywhere, it was a mess.
People wandered by the trailer covered in blood and Gene helped them clean up. Everyone seemed to be in a daze. A woman from his group came up and asked for some water and he gave her a bottle from the ice chest. When she turned around he could see her back was covered in blood and bits of flesh. Later he got in a conversation with a man who had also been close to the wreck. Same thing -- he turned around and his back too was plastered with human debris.
It was a good thing it was Friday and not the weekend with the big crowds. It was a good thing the plane came down vertically; if it had come in horizontal at that speed it would have taken out most of the grandstand area. It was especially a good thing that the fuel didn't explode. And for Gene of course it was a good thing he was doing the barbecue that day.
Tom and Gene have known each other for thirty years or so. Both have loved airplanes for as long as they can remember. Tom always wanted to be a commercial pilot and when his sister became a flight attendant ("stewardess" in those days) she paid for his first flying lesson. His boss at the drugstore lent him the money to take the full training at the Reno-Stead school, a real bona fide aviation academy that turned out commercial pilots. He took the courses in the few spare hours between his job and family life with a wife and new baby, got in 160 of the required 200 hours of flying time and passed the licensing exam before the academy went bankrupt. Which left him short of the full training and owing on the loan.
Twenty years later his wife struck up a conversation with a flight instructor in the waiting room at her doctor's office and passed his card on to Tom. So he went for lessons at the local airport and got licensed as a private pilot. He says he is probably the most overqualified private pilot in the country what with all the training he'd had at the academy, even instrument rating, even a course in meteorology. I never heard of lenticular clouds until he told me about them. Apparently the Sierras are one of the few places they form. They look like stacks of pancakes, caused by the swirling air currents near mountains.
Gene got interested in taking lessons from the same flight instructor after hearing Tom's story. He too became a pilot, and over the years the two of them would get together on weekends and fly somewhere for breakfast, up to Quincy or Chester in California or out to Hawthorne or Winnemucca or Elko. The local casinos would send someone to the airport to pick them up if they let them know they were coming. They never gambled but usually had a big omelet before flying home. They joked that it wouldn't be the flying that killed them but the cholesterol. When Gene's son Chris grew up he too became a pilot, now flies a corporate jet.
I asked Tom if the air races attracted a lot of pilots and he said I ought to go watch the private planes take off from Reno airport after an air show. So many pilots come into town for the event it is an air show in itself to watch them leave. "Hundreds?" I asked. Oh yeah, hundreds, a continuous line of four-to-six-seat Cessnas and Pipers and the like from the parking areas to the runway. They line them up on the runway two abreast and send them off in pairs. Two or three minutes apart, he wasn't sure about the timing any more, he hasn't gone to watch in years. If the wind was cooperative they'd have both the north-south and east-west runways stacked up at the same time, and then a pair could take off from one and the next pair from the other in half the time from only one. His wife got him a radio so he could hear what the tower and the pilots were saying to each other.
The investigation of the crash has focused on mechanical failure, and there are pictures showing a piece of the tail had fallen off. Some have suggested the pilot must have controlled the plane to keep it from hitting where it would have done much more damage, but Gene is sure that isn't what happened. He thinks something had knocked out the pilot, maybe a heart attack or maybe the heavy G's from taking a fast turn around a pylon. He says you can see quite clearly in some of the pictures of the plane coming down that there is nobody in the cockpit. It's a canopy type windshield and he'd be quite visible if he were still sitting up as he should have been. Gene is also sure he wasn't conscious because the plane came down at full power and a pilot at all conscious would have instinctively pulled back on the power. It hit the ground still going full bore. There was not enough left of the pilot's body for an autopsy.
Two days after the wreck Gene still talks about it in a quivering voice.
Neither Tom nor Gene knew any of the ten who were killed, though another friend who was there told Tom he's sure one of them was someone he had met years ago, but Tom didn't remember her. A lady who leaves behind eight children. The friend is going to see if he can find the photo with the two of them in it.
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Got this email from Tom forwarded from someone who had the results of the investigation into the cause of the crash. I get the gist of it though some of the pilot jargon is over my head:
Galloping Ghost crash
Ok... here's the skinny on the accident.... A P-51 normally has two trim tabs.. one on each elevator... this one had one and other one was fixed in place.. He was warned about the forces being put on that one tab. It failed.. He had at least a 10G load when the plane pitched up from the loss of the trim tab and he went "nighty night" and probably never woke up.
The telemetry downloaded from Galloping Ghost revealed an 11g pull-up, fuel flow interrupted on the way up, and then the engine restarted when fuel flow resumed at the top of the arc. The aircraft was making 105 inches of Manifold Pressure on the way down.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .Here's another "theory" of the crash from experienced racers.
In 1989 this type of thing happened to another pilot but he lived to tell the story.
When flying a P-51 at 450+mph you need to have full nose down trim to keep the plane level.
The elevator trim tab broke off and the aircraft immediately went in to a 10G climb, confirmed by the G-meter.
The pilot came to, from the sudden blackout and realized he had slipped through the shoulder harness and was looking at the floor of the airplane.
He was able to reach the throttle and pull it back to slow down and was able to recover and land.
