Awesome Bob Hoover stunt flying video

[propnuts]

Check out this link:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZBcapxGHjE

[trimtab]

Thanks for the link! That was a great video!

I remember several years ago when his engines quit because jet fuel was mistakenly pumped into his tanks. Someone at the pumps thought his Shrike Commander was a turboprop.

[Galvin]

That incident with the jet fuel was at Brown Field back in the early seventies as I recall and was the result of a brand new line boy's mistake. The story goes that Hoover, after bellying in the Commander dead stick, came back to the gas pits and explained exactly what had happened to the line boy in a fatherly manner without getting upset or violent. That part may be apocryphal because I don't know if I would be capable of not skinning someone alive whose dumb mistake nearly cost me my life.

I seem to recall that was the same Brown Field Races where one of our temporary hangar mates, Mike Gehren, had his Bearcat catch fire and plow into the infield right in front of the crowd. He was dong OK until he slid the canopy back to jump and sucked the fire right through the cockpit. Those late R-2800 accessory cases were mostly magnesium and burned like a highway flare once ignited.

I remember that aerobatics video from over thirty years ago, back when ol' Bob still had a lot of hair. It is still one of the icons of U.S. aviation. I saw his act in person many times and was never disappointed.

Hoover used to park his Shrike Commander, his P-51 (even after the fire that damaged it), and his T-28 at his hangar near the gas pits at Torrance Airport back in the eighties when I was doing a lot of free-lance instruction there. One could just walk over and see the scraped up wingtips on the Commander and P-51 close up if one was so inclined.

I had some contact with him when I was at Revell and we wanted to do a model of the reverse lend-lease 54th fighter group Spitfire Mk V that he was eventually shot down flying. On one of my several trips to Nice in southern France while working with with Guess? Jeans on their 727 back in the early 90s I later even went to see for myself the exact pillar in the courthouse in Nice that he was lashed to when the Germans beat him up during their post-rescue interrogation.

At Revell, I was able to piece together pretty closely what the airplane he was flying that day must have looked like (no photographs of it are known to exist) and got the color scheme, call letters, and RAF serial no. off the missing aircrew report and the squadron diary page for that day, copies of both of which I got from Airman Records Branch then at Maxwell AFB. After the model was on the shelves I sent the research copies to Hoover. His daughter later told me that she was so thrilled to have them that she had them framed. I think Hans Krebs, the guy who painted the very accurate picture of Hoover getting shot down over Nice Harbor that day, may have used those very same pieces of info to get his painting right.

My enduring impressions of Hoover are not only the one of him pouring iced tea during a roll (well, he SAID it was iced tea) but also one of him passed out cold in a hotel elevator late one night during one of the Reno Air Race weeks of the late sixties, a full glass of wine balanced on his head and his long legs sticking out into the corridor with the elevator door trying to close and reopening every time it hit him.

My friends say he was there for hours like that. I don't know, I went to bed.

[Wagon1]

I saw him fly in the mid 80's in Pennsylvania. Absolutley amazing. I'll never forget it.