I have been re-reading Stephen Coonts' Cannibal Queen, the story of his journey across the US in a Stearman, and in it he recounts the story of an F6F Hellcat that ended up in private hands:
I once knew a man who lived in the Willamette Valley. He had a farm here. I got to know him because he also had an airplane, a Grumman Hellcat. I met him at the Canadian National Airshow in Abbotsford, British Columbia, in 1974. I let him sit in the cockpit of the A-6 Intruder I had flown to the show and he let me sit in the cockpit of his Hellcat. Of course I was intensely curious about how he came to own and fly one of the premier naval fighters of World War II. So he told me the story.
It seems the president of Alaska Airlines got into trouble with his board of directors and was shown the door. The board decided to immediately rid itself of one of the president’s more flashy toys, the Hellcat, which was sitting at Boeing Field in Seattle. The farmer read about the airline’s desire to sell this plane in the newspaper one morning at breakfast. He invested in a long-distance telephone call and was told the price was $25,000 and the plane had to be off Boeing Field by five o’clock.
Like any true airplane enthusiast, our hero was a man who could make up his mind in a hurry. He stopped by the bank on the way to the airport and cleaned out his savings account. In Seattle he paid cash for the plane and presumably they gave him a ride to the hangar.
Although our hero had never flown a plane more powerful than a Cessna 172, he strapped himself into the captain’s seat of the Hellcat, successfully started the engine and aviated the fighter into the sky. He flew it home filled with emotions that can only be imagined.
Gasoline was expensive, he told me, and the Hellcat had a powerful thirst for it, so he logged his hours flying to and from airshows. When he arrived they filled the tanks for free. He flew it in flight demonstrations all weekend; then they filled up his tanks gratis when he left for home.
He never used the supercharger on that double-row radial engine, which made his flight demonstrations look a little anemic. He didn’t want to risk blowing one of those thirty-year-old jugs, he told me, because the cost of overhauling that engine would be more money than he had in the plane. He couldn’t afford it.
And he had a lot of jugs at risk. The Hellcat used an engine with two rows of nine cylinders each, a total of eighteen. That’s thirty-six spark plugs, eighteen intake valves, eighteen exhaust valves. Mechanics qualified and willing to work on these engines are an endangered species. Spare parts? Better have your own machine shop.
I always wondered whatever became of the Willamette farmer and his Hellcat, and a year or so ago I found a book that listed the owners and location of every flying warbird in the world. His name was in it.
According to the book he was killed in 1977 when the Hellcat was totally destroyed in a crash.
I have no idea why he crashed and I’m not about to look up his widow to ask. I don’t know if the weather got him or that old engine failed at the wrong time. I don’t know if he properly maintained the engine and airframe. I don’t know anything and I probably never will.
Still, flying over this valley I can see his smiling face and that beautiful airplane, and I envy him the joy it gave him. Every person should have a passion like that once in his life.
A bit of sleuthing led me to this listing for the Hellcat in question:
http://www.warbirdregistry.org/f6fregis ... 08825.htmlCoonts account was published in 1992, so his version of the story is 30 years old by now. I was wondering, does anyone know more about this particular accident? The Aviation Safety net listing mentions that it was a total loss of power, probably because of a misaligned fuel selector valve (
https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/238978). A bit of searching on this forum brings up a few topics about this Hellcat, and it is apparently at Aerial Visuals being restored for new owner Jack Crouch. Several of these topics mention the previous owner hanging on to the wreckage for a long time, wanting to restore it himself, but that doesn't quite tie up with the story from Coonts that mentions Willard Compton being killed in the accident (the Aviation Safety net listing does not agree, according to the NTSB summary one person was seriously injured). So was Coonts' version of the story incorrect?
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