A restored P-51 Mustang in Flight
(NASA photograph by Jim Ross)
Fighter still in the sky
by Pat Christian
Is Russ McDonald the luckiest
man in the world or what!
The 70-year-old Park City resident owns and flies a
P-51 Mustang, arguably the finest all-around fighter of World War II, and
it's keeping the retired airline pilot forever young.
We landlubbers sat on University Avenue in Provo
watching the Fourth of July parade.
But not McDonald. He was looking down on us as he buzzed
the parade route in his trusty steed.
“I flew over the parade at 1,000 feet, then flew home
to Park City for a second holiday flyover," McDonald said.
Although he likes parade flyovers and air shows, the
thrills don't come all that cheaply.
"It costs $600 per hour to fly," McDonald said. "Fuel
and oil cost $200 an hour. Then I put $200 an hour into the kitty for overhauling
the engine down the road. I also put in another $200 per hour for brakes,
tires and required inspections."
Fortunately, parade and air show organizers often pay
for gas and he often flys with a paying passenger. It was designed as single-seater,
but he removed a small fuel tank and radio to make room for an extra seat.
Even though he lives in Park City, you'll usually find
him working at his hangar at the Russell McDonald Airport in Heber City on
either the P-51 or his acrobatic, double-winged Pitts, which is cheaper to
fly than his P-51.
In 1947, McDonald helped establish the airport in that
bears his name today.
"I fly nearly every day," he said, admitting that neither
his Pitts nor his P-51 are really practical transportation. But no problem—he’s
a retired United Airlines pilot who flys free on commercial airlines.
So what's the difference between flying his P-51 the
DC-10 he used to fly?
McDonald jokes the airliner uses even more fuel than
his P-51.
“It (P-51) only averages 60 gallons per hour. And unlike
the DC-10, nobody brings you coffee."
McDonald has been flying since he was 17. He learned
to fly at the old Provo, Utah airport.
He had wanted to be a World War II fighter pilot, but
by the time he graduated from high school, military flight schools weren’t
taking applications anymore. So the closest he got was finishing the final
months of the war driving a fuel truck.
Author Richard Bach says building a model of an airplane
is a mystical act. If done right, it brings the real McCoy into your life
he says.
It seemed to work for McDonald. He admits to having
made more than one plastic model of a P-51 as a boy, and voila, now he owns
one.
Especially in the romantic prop-driven days of aviation
many red-blooded American boys’ dream was to sit in the office of a P-51.
But today P-51s are almost as extinct as the passenger
pigeon.
North American Aviation in Inglewood, Calif. and Dallas,
Tex. manufactured about 15,575 of the P-51s. Another 100 were made in Australia.
But according to McDonald, there are only 144 flying today worldwide. And
only 105 of those are in the United States.
So what's it like to fly in a P-51?
"It's a lot of fun to fly. I enjoy it every time," McDonald
said, but what an understatement.
McDonald took me up for a 15-minute ride that burned
40 gallons in two short buzzes of the airfield and a little game of upset-the-new-guy's-stomach,
where he performed an aileron roll and a barrel roll.
What a fantastic ride. For a moment I could imagine
being a WWII fighter pilot.
Starting the engine with the P-51’s onboard 24-volt
batteries, McDonald warmed up the oil in the 1,680-horsepower V-16 engine
and poured Prestone coolant into the planes radiators.
Then he wobbled down the runway. Until you’re going
fast enough to lift the tail-wheel up, the angle of the cockpit doesn’t afford
the pilot a good view ahead, so they wobble or weave, back and forth to get
a better view ahead of them.
Pedal to the metal, prop spinning wildly, rolling, rolling
faster. In seconds, we were off the ground climbing
fast. It only takes a minute for the P-51 to climb 2,000 feet.
McDonald’s fine-tuned P-51 was smooth as a feathered
eagle in the air. There was hardly any vibration.
Noise, however, was something else altogether. With
our earphones on, we could hardly hear each other talk over the engine’s
roar.
At one point, I lifted the an earphone off one ear,
and a good way to describe the experience is to say it was like attending
a loud rock concert and sitting inside the biggest, meanest loudspeaker there.
There's a reason for all the noise—the unmuffled exhausts
for the throaty Rolls-Royce Merlin engine exit right in front of the cockpit.
I mean right in front of the Plexiglas office window.
Inside the cockpit, you don't hear that distinctive,
powerful whine folks on the ground hear when a P-51 zooms over them.
McDonald says the sound is caused by air being rammed through the belly
scoop into a pair of radiators, and you just can’t hear that whine inside
the cockpit.
We were back on the ground almost before we knew it,
and McDonald pulled up to his hangar and quickly shut the P-51’s engine off
before the water temperature gage got to a critical point.
"Now I can't turn it back on for four hours," he said.
He explained that after the engine heats up to cruising speed, the air being
rammed in flight through radiators keeps the plane from overheating. But when
it lands, taxiing is just too slow to cool the already-hot engine anymore.
So the engine starts to overheat, forcing him to wait for the engine to cool
down before he can taxi out for another takeoff.
“How fast did we fly?” I asked McDonald.
"We went about 280, max," McDonald answered.
That was quite a bit slower than the 442 mph maximum
speed for the P-51. It was also somewhat slower than the cruising speed of
362 mph.
No, it hadn’t been the speed of light, but it sure was
faster than the speed of flying fun.
Call me anytime Russ, and I’ll be there.
A version of this story was published in
The Daily Herald
.
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