Continued, page two. Letters From the West:
I found Strauchen in his hangar tinkering with the yellow and red Stearman's massive radial engine. Like Russ and Lynn, Ed is typical of the flyers that populate the Heber Valley Airport. Once a Navy F-4 Phantom pilot, Ed was until recently a Boeing 767 captain for a major airline. Now he's having a lot more fun.
"I moved out here from back east in 1989," says Strauchen. "There wasn't much at the airport back then. 'Rustic' would be a generous description of it. The FBO did have an indoor toilet, but it was really cold."
What changed the "rustic" airport, says Strauchen, was Delta Airlines' purchase of Western Airlines. Virtually overnight, Salt Lake City became a major Delta hub. Many of the Delta pilots coming in chose to settle in nearby Park City. Heber Valley, just 15 miles to the south, had the only airport anywhere near the popular ski resort town. "That put an extra 500 pilots into this area all at once, and the airport really took off."
Now there are two kinds of people at the airport, according to Strauchen. "There are the flying enthusiasts--people who fly just for the love of it--
and another group who keep airplanes there primarily for transportation." One look at Ed's hangar will tell you to which group he belongs. When they decided to share their love of flying and their marvelous collection of planes with the public, Ed and other enthusiasts recently turned Ed's hangar into the Heber Valley Air Museum.
"We had all these neat airplanes already here," Strauchen said, "and I had this big hangar. So it all just came together." The initial stimulus came from Steve Guenard, a former USAF F-106 pilot who flies for a major airline. Guenard helped Ed and Ed's wife, Myra, rebuild their Stearman, and is now restoring his own Stearman. He also owns a Piper J-3 Cub which hangs in the museum.
"Steve always wanted to have a museum here," explained Ed. "He had a lot of things from his military flying days and I had stuff from my Navy flying," said Strauchen. "But what really made the Heber Valley Aero Museum possible was the World War II guys."
The "World War II guys" were B-17 pilot Jack Wells, P-47 and P-40 pilot Harry Moyer, military glider pilot Bernice Watts and B-24 bombardier, Malcolm Macgregor. They became an integral part of the museum, bringing in two display cases full of WWII memorabilia.
Ed's and Myra's daughter Bradley, a London museum curator, assembled the collections of displays that share Hangar One with the airplanes.
Not everything fits in the one hangar. Russ McDonald explained, "My hangar is an annex of the museum. So many people want to come see a Mustang, that it just made sense." McDonald figures he spends about 5 hours a day at the airport anyway, so he just opens his hangar to the public while he is there. Lynn Oswald's hangar housing his former Royal Laotian Air Force AT-28 Trojan, also serves as an annex of the Heber Valley Aero Museum.
Aero Museum President Ed Strauchen says that the local FBO, or fixed base operator, Wasatch Aero, is also a key part of the Heber Valley flying mix. "Since Nadim Abu-Haidar bought the company three years ago," he said, "the commercial side of the airport has really made great strides." That helps the museum.
It also helps add a lot of luster to the occasional EAA fly-in or Heber Valley Aero Museum air show. Abu-Haidar, a former Navy F-18 pilot, has his own interesting collection of planes. In addition to a fleet of new Katana and Skyhawk trainers, Nadim brought in a state-of-the-art Edge 540 and Extra 350 aerobatic monoplane.
On a recent day the ramp was crowded with pilots, townspeople with their children, Boy Scouts and aviation groupies like me. The show started with Ed Strauchen dropping a skydiver out of his Stearman then circling the parachutist as he descended. Ed and Steve Guenard then made formation passes over the field with two Stearman biplanes in close formation, followed by aerobatic displays by Russ McDonald's silky smooth P-51 Mustang and Lynn Oswald's thundering T-28 Trojan. Nadim Abu-Haidar then dazzled the crowd with an aerobatic routine in his Edge that seemed to closely mimic a gymnastic tumbling act. Then came routines by Carl Penner's T-6 Texan, and the Strikemaster jet. Just like Oshkosh.
Like the museum itself, this show was free to the public. The pilots put on the shows for the same reason they operate the museum. "We want educate the public on aviation and aviation history," said Ed Strauchen. "And we want to share our love of flying."
A show like this is always scheduled for the annual fly-in hosted by the local EAA chapter on the first weekend after Labor Day. But they do parts of it whenever the urge to fly hits them. When any one of them takes his plane up for a ride, which happens daily, it usually turns into a show for the folks on the ground.
So the next time you are in the Salt Lake City area, stop by the Russ McDonald Heber Valley Airport and Heber Valley Aero Museum and say hello. Heber City is a 45-minute freeway drive from Salt Lake. You can also reach it by driving northeast up into the mountains from Provo They'll all be happy to see you.
He was executive editor of Airman Magazine and is retired from NASA. He met many of the Heber Valley Aero pilots at Oshkosh and now hangs around the airport hoping for rides. So far, he's flown a Stearman with Steve Guenard and had an aerobatic flight with Ed Strauchen in the Yak 52. Strauchen, he reports, seems to like flying with the blue part down and the green part up. "Boy, can these guys fly!"