Dear Jim:

It was a hot, early March day here in Green Valley, Arizona. Too hot to work around the yard. At least that's what I told my wife. While the rest of the country was digging out from under various snow storms, it was almost 90 degrees here in LA (Lower Arizona). A real hot tamale.

What I really wanted to do was to go see some airplanes - any airplanes - and I knew that it was the annual Aviation Day at Ryan Air Field just a few miles west of Tucson. To put that airport in geographical perspective, I'll just say that if John Wayne had been firing real 44-40 shells in the movie Rio Bravo (or just about any other western film) he'd have plugged more than a few planes lifting off from Ryan Field, a stone's throw from the Old Tucson movie location.

So picture cactus and a flat desert where the flying weather is spotless about 362 days each year. Out we went.

The first thing I noticed at Ryan was something rare - a plane I could not identify. I've always prided myself on my totally useless skill of being able to tell the difference between an H model and D model B-52 at five miles, or differentiate a C-82 Packet from the similar C-110 Flying Boxcar at closer range. This was something new. Idling on the taxiway in front of the crowd was a Navy blue fighter with a tail like an early B-17, a "greenhouse" canopy like a P-47, but with a radial engine.

It turned out to be Steve Hay's North American 50, which someone said was a fighter version of the venerable T-6 Texan (or SNJ if you speak Navy) trainer. Michael Racy (boy, does that name ever fit) followed with a neat show in his Sukoi aerobatic plane, and Maj. Robert Brogandelighted the crowd with a demonstration of the ground attack capability of the huge A-10 Warthog.

The Warthog has a special place in my heart because I was at Davis-Monthan AFB right here in Tucson when the very first operational bird was delivered. I was a young captain doing a story for Airman, the USAF's official magazine. The big bruiser plane was controversial back then; many of the A-7 pilots at D-M really didn't want to retire their spiffy neck scarves and leave the A-7 "fighter, " a scaled down F-8 Crusader, for the monstrous and ugly twin jet. Never mind they were both ground attack planes, it was all about image. So I chuckled over the glowing words Brogan's Tech Sergeant narrator poured into the PA system about the A-10 during the demo. The term Warthog is no longer a pejorative. Amazing how some war experience can change people's minds.

Late in the A-10 demo, retired Maj. Gen. Reg Urschler took off in his P-51 Mustang and joined up on Major Brogan for a few passes in tight formation. This was billed as the Heritage Flight formation. Pretty neat. I couldn't help wondering out loud how the 50-year-old recip fighter was able to go slow enough to stay back with the newer, pure jet A-10. Funny how requirements change. Ex-astronaut Byron Lichtenberg, a National Guard A-10 pilot, once told me he couldn't break 350 knots "with a Saturn Five up my butt." I think he was talking about his A-10.

Marsha and I wandered around the static displays, risking heat stroke and sunburn, and then accepted the Ryan invitation to visit nearby hangars. We loved the bluegrass group performing for visitors.

There were some nice Stearmans, a replica DH-4 mail plane complete with antique pilot (he said he started flying in B-19 bombers), and some nice homebuilts (see next page). But probably the most interesting thing on display was a venerable C-54 transport fitted out as a slurry bomber to fight forest fires.

This was a grand old gal. It came out of Don Douglas's DC-4 plant in 1945 and flew as a MATS transport out of Kelly Field, Texas, and McChord in Washington, Then, during the Korean War, it went back and forth from Ashiya AB in Japan to the Land of the Morning Calm (less calm in those days). It made it to the Berlin Airlift and some other military events before spending ten years hauling passengers between the various islands of the Army's Kwajalein Missile Range in Micronesia. Can you say corrosion boys and girls?

Then somehow it took a wrong turn. Sold out of the bone yard at Davis-Monthan, it was later reacquired by the US government after it was discovered hauling 18,000 pounds of negotiable produce of the hemp variety up from some Latin American country. That led to another sale and a new lease on life as a bomber. What a career! I stood on the flight deck and wondered about all the people who had once steered this grand old bird. I'm sure there were ghosts. I may have been one of them.

Back in 1964 as an AFROTC cadet I flew in a C-54, maybe this very one, from Hill AFB in Utah all the way to Andrews AFB near Washington D.C. It took 12 hours, and we went straight through the single worst outbreak of thunderstorms and tornados ever to hit the Midwest . With both the autopilot and weather radar out of service it was a nightmare for us while the pilots had to hand fly their way between the towering cells hour after hour. I was so sick, for so long, this memory kept me out of recreational flying for the next thirty years!

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