Warbird Information Exchange

Condolences.

Sad news

Spang

Everytime something like this happens, you feel like you just got kicked in the groin. A painful experience whether or not you knew the person. The warbird community is a very unique group and when one of us loses his life regardless of the ultimate cause, I question whether we are really doing the right thing. A good friend of mine lost his life two years ago at our fly-in that I was in charge of while flying his super cub. To this day, I feel somehow responsible for that event even though everyone has told me that there was nothing that I could have done to prevent it. I am currently working on restoring a MiG-15 and upon hearing of Bob Guilfords loss, I question it again. Is what I'm doing serving any real good or just providing a vehicle for someones demise? Having known several people who have died in aircraft, both warbird and general aviation, and understanding their passion for flight and the responsibility they felt at preserving our aviation past, I can only draw on this to continue. Their love of aircraft and their enthusiasm for what they did is what keeps me going and lets me know that what we do DOES serve a positive purpose and it is worthwhile to continue both to honor the individual and his legacy. My feelings go out to Mr. Guilfords family and one can only hope that out of this tragedy we each resolve to keep flying as safely as possible. Lets all live to be a hundred!

"and touched the face of God"

Good bye.
Tail winds forever.

Found this today:
Pilot in post-air show crash lived to fly, son says
7/17/2006, 3:31 p.m. PT
By JULIA SILVERMAN
The Associated Press


PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Robert Guilford lived his life with his head in the clouds — and often enough, his feet were there too.

The 73-year-old aviation attorney from Los Angeles crashed a vintage combat jet into a suburban neighborhood on Sunday, moments after taking off from a nearby air show in Hillsboro. He was the only fatality.

Family members and colleagues described Guilford as an experienced pilot who lived his life either flying, or dreaming of the next time he'd be up in the air.

"He was a lawyer, but that was just his way of enabling his flying habit," said his son, Steve Guilford, interviewed by telephone from Los Angeles.

A Cleveland native, Robert Guilford attended the University of Virginia as an undergraduate and received a law degree at Harvard. He was admitted to the bar in California in 1959, served for a year as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, and spent the last 13 years of his career with the Los Angeles-area law firm of Baum Hedlund.

Most recently, he was one of the lawyers who brokered a settlement between a Texas-based aircraft manufacturer and the widows of a 1998 helicopter crash that killed three Los Angeles firefighters and a girl being flown to the hospital.

Fighter planes were his special passion.

Steve Guilford said that his father flew for 45 years, logging more than 4,000 hours in the air as the owner of vintage combat airplanes, including a P-51 Mustang, a Corsair and the British-made Hawker Hunter jet that crashed on Sunday.

"I enjoy being able to show it around, preserve it, keep the breed going, so to speak," Robert Guildford said in a CNN profile for a story about civilian pilot air safety.

Steve Guilford called his father, "a conservative pilot," and said he believed Sunday's crash was caused by mechanical error, and that his father could have ejected once he realized that the engine was faltering, but that he instead tried to minimize external damage.

"My grandmother would be proud to know that he did everything he could to protect the people on the ground," Guilford said. "That was certainly part of his ethic."

His father started flying before it was fashionable, before vintage planes were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars and Hollywood stars were taking flying lessons, Guilford said.

Robert Guilford helped establish the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, Calif., and was a co-founder of WarBirds of America, a group of pilots and others interested in the preservation of old military aircraft. He was also the only American authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to train other pilots to fly the Hawker Hunter, the jet he died in Sunday.

He flew in the Reno Air Races in Nevada for years, his son said, but, "he was more out there to tool around than he was to be competitive."

Steve Guilford said he planned to come to Oregon to retrieve his father's remains.

"I will travel up there, and complete his flight," he said.

Found it here:
http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/reg ... st=orlocal

I have known Bob almost since my first days with Warbirds 24 years ago. A nice guy, a lawyer with a love for aviaton, and a good sense of humor. He flew out of Santa Monica, I believe, and previously flew a Corsair " Blue Max" and a Mustang. It sounds as if no one was injured on the ground which is some comfort to Bob's friends. As for a causes of the accident, I believe you honor a pilot by, if possible, learning from an accident and trying to help the next person avoid similar trouble. Anyone writing about a cause should be careful to be certain their information is factual and pertinent, not just gossip. It will be months before the offical report is out, at that point there may be something applicble to others. I know very little about jets, but there is an active group of owners. Bill Greenwood