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. 

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