June 22, 2021 Summertime Fun

The Liberty Gazette

June 22, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

AT-6 "Texan"

The fly-in and car show at the Beaumont Municipal Airport was a great choice to start off the summer. The event was a fundraiser for the Commemorative Air Force, Houston Wing. Wing leader, Denise
Walker, expressed her thanks to airport manager Chris Meauw, who invited them to fly rides in their WWII-era aircraft, an AT-6 (“Texan”), while he collected entry fees for the car show, where owners could opt to compete in the judging, and sold hot lunches cooked onsite, with and all proceeds going to the Houston Wing. 

The Houston Wing also owns and maintains a PT-19 and a C-60 large transport, both from the WWII era, and an L-17 Navion, a Vietnam-era aircraft. These fundraisers are important because they help defray the costs of maintaining the aircraft. The “Texan” they brought to the fly-in costs $800-$1000 per hour to operate.

Denise and her crew are based at the West Houston airport off I-10 in Katy, but theirs is a flying museum, bringing living history to the public, to educate, honor, and inspire. If you were an 18-year-old cadet joining the Army Air Corps flight training program back then, you would have started training in the N3N or PT-19, the primary trainers. If you mastered those, you would have moved up to basic aircraft, and then to advanced trainers like the AT-6, which is fully aerobatic. After training, you would have had a choice to fly a multi-engine aircraft (a bomber), or a fighter, such as the P51 Mustang or the Helldiver. 

“In this way,” says Denise, “we also honor our greatest generation. People can see and touch the airplanes and talk to pilots who fly them now and immerse themselves in the history. Not to mention that noise that goes right through you when they start up!” 

Manuel Cachutt is part of the crew, too. He is going to school to be an aviation mechanic, but on weekends, he works to restore and preserve these airplanes. 

Aerial view of Beaumont Municipal Airport Fly-In

“These are pieces of history,” Manuel explains. “All of the aviation mechanic schools, they don’t teach this. They don’t teach radial engines or fabric covered airplane parts. They’re mostly focused on the airlines. So, the CAF, we work on aircraft that are hard to find just anywhere. These are historical
artifacts. It’s a testament to the guys who fought, bled…blood, sweat and tears, for these aircraft, the memory of World War Two, because the sad part is, we’re running out of people who remember World War Two, and the role these aircraft played. And not just in wartime, but in industry and in the hearts of the blue collar American everywhere. And it’s a great honor to be a part of this.” 

Now that you know, you’ll surely want to go see for yourself, and you’re in luck. They have a museum and working hangar there at West Houston, and everyone is welcome. Plan a visit, meet Manuel, Denise, and the crew. See https://www.houstonwing.org/, or call or email them at 281-579-2131 or info@houstonwing.org.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

June 15, 2021 My Friend Wayne

The Liberty Gazette

June 15, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Last week we promised to tell what Wayne Rodgers learned from his Air Force squadron leader, decorated ace, Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr. “Kinch,” as they called him, was arrogant and demanding. He tried hard to make his squad of three novice pilots quit.

In the F86, Kinch would make his squad fly under his tail, each plane then flying under the tail of the next plane in a straight line. He would take them around in that formation, try to lose them, and they would play chase. Over the Great Salt Lake, he took them lower and lower, and one by one, the squad peeled out in self-preservation–except for Kinch.  

 The lowest point on the F86 was a drain tube the length and girth of a pencil protruding from the under part of the plane. Wayne told his family years later that he had his greatest joy in those days from flying low over the salt flats, so low he would have to put his plane down for repair due to an aft-bent drain tube. He would never tell maintenance how it happened. When his kids asked if he bent his drain tube flying that low, he shook his head no, saying, “That's crazy. Only Kincheloe would do that.”

Wayne loved flying formation in the Grand Canyon. Kinch took them below the rim, and they flew wingtip-to-wingtip vertically along the walls of the canyon. In the low valleys, Kinch knew exactly how close and how low he could get so that the fourth man in the flight would never hit the wall or the bottom. 

Wayne became animated when recounting how they climbed up the wall from the lowest point in the canyon with Kinch taking them mere feet from the tourist observation deck on the south rim, and as they flew away, looking back at all the tourists lying all over the ground. He said you always felt like you were just about to bite the dust, but they learned to trust their leader, and he never did them wrong. 

Wayne once broke the sound barrier in a dive, which was outside the envelope for the F86, but it was another badge of courage. But the hardest, most dangerous part of training was target practice. They dove to billboard-sized targets on the ground and shot at them in high-speed flight. The danger was in being nearly hypnotized by the target and flying straight into it, which unfortunately happened to some guys.

The bonds formed with fellow aviators were deep. Gary Powers, who’s U2 spy plane was shot down over Russia, was a friend. So were astronaut Gordon Cooper and others in the space program. It was tough when Wayne’s whole training class was killed on their flight to Germany. He missed the flight because he had the flu. He named his son Gordon, after his best friend lost on that flight.

That’s my friend Wayne in just a few words. But he was a monumental man. I miss him. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

June 8, 2021 Remembering Wayne Rodgers

The Liberty Gazette

June 8, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: Many years ago, my first job out of paralegal school was with a small firm in Kingwood. I worked for the two partners, but I also had many occasions to visit with another lawyer, one who rented space in the same office. 

Wayne Rodgers had retired as a vice president of Brown & Root and was helping people with their wills, probate, and real estate needs. We officed together there for nearly four years, and in that time, I came to have a deep respect for him. Solid, truthful, caring, unselfish. But he never told me he had been a fighter pilot in Korea. That was something I learned recently from one of his daughters. 

Wayne has moved to heaven, having a sweet life, I am sure. Meanwhile, as I’m still here, I have heard about another side of Wayne. I wish I’d known these stories back in the day. But now, all I want to do is honor him by sharing them with you. Wayne’s family explained his true unwillingness to tell these stories—they had to drag them out of him. 

Lt. Wayne Rodgers and his T-6 Texan

He was in his junior year at the University of Texas when the Korean war broke out. He and several of his buddies went down and signed up in the Air Force. He started flight training in the T-6 Texan at
Lackland and then went on to Big Spring for combat skills and weapon training. 

Wayne had grown up in Munday, Texas, and his parents’ home was across the street from the old, two-story Munday High School. On cross country flights, he would head straight to Munday and dive bomb and do high-speed flyovers over the high school. He knew his parents were at work, so they would be none the wiser. He just wanted to show off. That big radial engine was so loud, he emptied the entire school to watch his air show. This happened two or three times until the principal talked to his parents to ask him to please stop. It was said later that his flying escapades proved to be a tremendous recruiting tool in the years that followed. 

After Combat Skills Training, he transitioned into the F86 aircraft at Nellis AFB to get his go-to-war training. Texas was playing Tennessee in the 1951 Cotton Bowl, and at halftime, he could not stand the thought of starting that training without his Becky. He got up, told his buddies, “I'll see you for class at Nellis in a few days,” and headed to Mississippi to get married. Swank, young pilot that he was, he surprised, married and hauled off his Becky to Nevada. In private, he would smile and shake his head at the sheer gall he possessed in those youthful, desperate days. 

At Nellis, Wayne’s squadron leader was decorated ace, Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr., who he said had a mission to make his squad of three novice pilots quit. Just wait till you find out what Wayne learned to do! Next week… 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com 

June 1, 2021 Warp Speed

The Liberty Gazette

June 1, 2021

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The first time I heard of warp speed was as a kid when it was introduced into our lives via the TV series Star Trek. What it meant in the series was a speed that was faster than the speed of light, that it may take only minutes to reach a star 30 or 50 light years away. But this flew in the face of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which says, in part, that as mass approaches the speed of light, it expands to infinity. 

So why didn’t the starship Enterprise blow up? The answer is that the Enterprise was operating in a protective bubble at sub-light speed. The ship’s warp drives, acting like the afterburners for supersonic jets but for starships, convert energy, both matter and anti-matter, to bend both space and time—warping it. The space in front of the bubble contracts and the space behind it expands, creating a wave of energy. This wave moving faster than light, pushes the ship along as if it were a surfer. 

This is all great science fiction, and with enough unknowns in physics, there is a vague plausibility to the idea. Einstein didn’t say space couldn’t be expanded or contracted. One thing is certain, the Star Trek TV program brought physics into the average American home, even if it wasn’t exact science. 

The imagination of Gene Rodenberry, the show’s creator, spawned things we take for granted today, like the communicators and tricorders we call cell phones today. It also got people interested in space, and it garnered support for the United States manned space program. 

Interestingly, the original series was canceled after just three years. When Neil Armstrong was making his small step for man, the lights were going out on the Star Trek set. But not for long. Trekkie conventions still have sellout crowds, and each generation brings another set of fans. 

Rodenberry was an Army Air Corps pilot in WWII and flew 89 missions in B-17s operating out of Hawaii. After the war, he became a commercial pilot for Pan Am World Airways. He left that career to pursue writing and become a police officer. In his spare time, he wrote scripts for the TV shows Highway Patrol and Have Gun Will Travel. Then came his breakthrough with Star Trek, where he not only introduced physics in general, but he incorporated many aviation terms and practices as well. When Rodenberry passed away in 1991, his ashes were among the first human remains to be taken into space. 

Can something travel faster than the speed of light? Recently, scientists measured a couple jets of energy inside the black hole identified as M87. X-ray data appears to show particles in the jets traveling faster than the speed of light due to a phenomenon known as superluminal motion. One such cluster, or knot, was measured at 6.7 times the speed of light. Like Gene Rodenberry’s imagination that has inspired countless other imaginations—those particles appear to be traveling at warp speed.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com