BL: A strange relationship seems to have developed between your correspondent and the TICO Warbird Airshow (Titusville, Florida). It began three years ago when it rained on the show..and rained..and rained..and I got wetter and wetter and wetter. Matters became even more tenuous when I sloshed through the mud looking for the car I had somehow misplaced. The show was great..I was miserable.

Last year, I covered every moment of the show in spite of what I thought was a sore left arm caused by shoulder surgery. I found out a month later that the surgery was not the problem. It was a heart attack I had unknowingly suffered some weeks or months previously. So, in April, it was open heart surgery and a double by-pass.

So what, I said to myself, could possibly happen this year? I found out soon enough. Part way through the Friday afternoon airshow I decided to lie down and rest for a moment. Not paying proper attention, I lay myself on a small patch of cacti (cactusi? cactuses?). It doesn't make a helluva lot of difference. The "punctures" still itch and it lasts for days. But I carried on like a trooper in flea country: shoot and scratch..shoot and scratch..shoot and scratch..until it became unbearable and I fled to re-group for another session the next day. Sure enough, on Saturday it was much better: shoot, shoot, shoot and scratch. Shoot, shoot, shoot and scratch.

However, I got some good stuff.

The highlight for me was meeting Gen. Paul Tibbets. For those of you born after 1950 or so, he was the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima to end World War II. I asked the General (Center, back row of crew picture) what was going through his mind on that historic flight. He said, "It was gonna' be a big bang..and it was!" So, I asked, how did you get out of there? Fly straight ahead? Do a 180? Nope. Tibbets says the director of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, told him to fly tangentially with the cloud..and that's what he did. Another interesting part of the story: when Tibbets was selected to organize and train a unit to develop the bombing techniques and to supervise mods needed on the B29, he was given a secret code word. If anyone hassled him about his requirements he only had to say SILVERPLATE. The "hasslers" would immediately throw him a salute and a "yes, sir." Now that's authority!

Not so incidentally, Tibbetts was accompanied on this trip by his Enola Gay navigator, Dutch Van Kirk (Tibbetts, left in picture).

To list all of General Tibbetts' accomplishments and medals would take far more space and time than any of us has available. Suffice to say, he is enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

It is difficult to single out any particular pilot at a war bird show. Almost all have distinguished military careers. But I am going to mention Dick Foote. Why? Because he brought and flew his Grumman Wildcat in the TICO show. Dick was a Navy pilot in World War II..was at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack..later flew seaplanes off catapults on destroyers and heavy cruisers. He was also the test pilot for the first Corsair (the plane, not the car) and was one of the first American pilots to fly a captured Japanese Zero. What makes him even more interesting is that Dick Foote is reportedly in his 80s.

For more of Bill's great pictures of the TICO show, click here..