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Vintage pilot's practice pays off
BY CHRISTINE ARMARIO
STAFF WRITER
January 24, 2006
The restored World War II fighter plane had flown missions in China against the Japanese before Pearl Harbor and fought with the famed Flying Tigers. But during takeoff Sunday from Brookhaven airport, the army-green airplane had barely risen 600 feet when Robert Baranaskas realized his control stick was stuck.
Baranaskas, who flies three vintage World War II planes in homage to his father, a war-era pilot and trainer, was unable to steer the P-40 plane. He radioed his 25-year-old son, who was flying another restored plane ahead, that he needed an escort to the Calverton Airport for an emergency landing.
"It was all adrenaline," said the son, Chris Baranaskas, who was flying a silver-bodied P-51 Mustang.
As Robert Baranaskas was making his descent toward the airport, his son yelled over the radio, warning him that only half of the landing gear had gone down. Fearing the plane would erupt into flames, Baranaskas bypassed the airport and made a smooth and softer landing in an old, wet cornfield in Wading River, surrounded by weeds, with only a minor scrape on his hand.
"To a lot of people, it may sound like a real stressful affair," Robert Baranaskas, 58, a real estate developer from Northport, said of the ordeal. "But it's not for us. It's something that we practice."
Federal Aviation Administration officials, who were on the scene Sunday afternoon, said the cause of the mechanical error was still under investigation.
Waiting yesterday on the cornfield where he landed for his plane to be transported for repairs, Baranaskas described his decades-long fascination with World War II fighter planes, some of which were flown by his father.
"I'm just in love with the whole World War II era," Robert Baranaskas said. "The united country solving one goal ... the commitment that these young men made."
Learning to fly in 1969, he said he took to flying the restored fighter planes, eventually acquiring and restoring several of his own. The P-40 airplane he was flying Sunday had just been purchased in Illinois last week, he said, and had once been flown by Col. Robert Scott of the Flying Tigers, a WWII ace, Baranaskas said.
Baranaskas had flown the plane several times before Sunday's incident and was out this weekend to train with his son for a summer air show. The father-son duo performs up and down the East Coast, including at the New York Airshow at Jones Beach, Baranaskas said.
"I just like the beauty of bringing the plane back to life," he said.
After his father's safe landing Sunday, Chris Baranaskas flew back to Brookhaven Airport and then drove to the spot, off Hulse Landing Road, where his father had landed.
When he saw his father, he gave him a big hug. "In my eyes," Chris Baranaskas said, "he's a hero."
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
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