Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
Dudley Henriques wrote in
:

Hmm, neverr really got any action out of my bear!
Roscoe must have with that lion, though. Gilmore,after his
sponsers, of course.

Bertie

Come to think of it, almost every picture I ever saw of Turner with
Gilmore, he was smiling :-))

Those guys were like rock stars back then.
I think he had to give Gilmore to a zoo when he got to be to big to
manage.


Bertie

I remember reading something to that effect I think, way back in the
stone age someplace. Ole' Roscoe must have been quite a fellow.
Those early pilots really had what it took. Flying some of those old
crates was taking your life in you hands even before you made it to
pattern altitude.
I think it was Andy Sephton, check pilot for the Shuttleworth
collection
who said he considers the Bleriot monoplane one of the trickist
airplanes he has ever flown.


I've flown a model of one and it was a handful. Minimal power and
massive drag and the wing warping made life very interesting as well. On
top of that, the engine overheated and died after about ten minutes of
flight!
But the contraptions that Roscoe was flying were truly scary on a whole
'nuther level. That Wedell Williams with the Hornet must have been
positively evil to fly. And of course he crashed that airplane earlier
due to carb ice.


Bertie

Every now and then at some of our shows I'd get a chance to sit down and
jaw awhile with the Formula 1 race pilots. Steve Whittman was at a few
of these ("war stories" gab sessions) Steve had some amazing stuff from
the "old days", and would have us all laughing like idiots telling us
about flying some of the old planes.
I actually got a taste of what he was talking about when I flew a
Cassutt race plane one afternoon. Actually, you don't really FLY a
Cassutt, you WEAR a Cassutt :-) Even the Pitts wasn't as sensitive on
the controls as that beast. But it was great fun and I caught on quickly
after it scared the s**t out of me on take off. I rotated and went to
100 feet before I could ease off the tiny bit of back pressure I had
used to do that :-))
In my opinion, the guys who flew those early planes were REAL pilots!!
:-))

--
Dudley Henriques