In the years after the Second World War and the Korean conflict, many Mustangs were acquired by civilian enthusiasts, some for as little as $1,500. One such buyer was Albert Paul Mantz, the crack movie pilot. By 1946, Mantz had accumulated a collection of thirty-two aircraft of various types and ages which he used in film work for the Hollywood studios. He was about to expand considerably with the purchase of many surplus war planes.
An American organization called the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was disposing of thousands of fighters, bombers, trainers and transports at several locations around the U.S., one being Stillwater, Oklahoma, where the field, ramps, and runways were littered with hundreds of war-weary machines.
Mantz and his financial backers outbid their competition to become the owners of 500 military aircraft—eight Mustangs, seventy-five B-17 Flying Fortresses, 228 B-24 Liberators, ten B-25 Mitchells, twenty-two B-26 Marauders, ninety P-40 Warhawks, six P-39 Airacobras, thirty-one P-47 Thunderbolts and thirty miscellaneous types. He paid a total of $55,000. for the lot—not much considering the American government had paid $117,000,000. for them a few years before. Mantz knew too, that the aviation gas remaining in their tanks was worth more than his purchase price for the planes themselves. He believed that the scrap value of the aluminium alone was probably in excess of $150,000., and there was at least $100,000. worth of Plexiglas in them as well. But the deal came with a definite downside. Mantz was required by the government to remove all of his planes from the Stillwater site by a deadline date that he soon discovered he could not meet.
The logistics of moving that vast fleet of planes from mid-America to Mantz’s California base of operations proved insurmountable and, in a final, desperate effort to keep a small portion of his newly acquired air force, he turned to a long-time friend in the motion picture industry, asking a long-time friend, Bill Guthrie of Warner Brothers. Warners was known for making more aviation-related movies than any other filmmaker in that time and Mantz tried to persuade Guthrie that the studio would save a lot of money by establishing its own Aviation Department. He told the Warners man that if the studio would pay the cost of moving twelve of the aircraft to California for him, he would provide the planes for use in Warner Brothers movies for half the usual price. Guthrie, however, replied that he preferred to remain strictly in the movie business, not the junk business.
Mantz had to settle for bringing only twelve of the best aircraft in his purchase to Burbank Airport near Los Angeles on his own. He was forced to let his business partners sell the remainder of his warplane fleet for scrap.
Of the twelve aircraft Mantz kept, three would receive special attention. One was a promising B-25 Mitchell bomber that he rebuilt into a near-perfect aerial camera plane with an enlarged Plexiglas nose and a swiveling director’s chair. He named it The Smasherand used it for many years to capture some of the most spectacular aerial cinematography ever made, footage for great films like The Best Years of Our Lives. The other two were P-51 Mustangs, which he revered. He had never flown a Mustang until one week before the 1946 Bendix Trophy Race, but within ten flight hours he declared himself ready to compete in the post-war resumption of the classic race from Los Angeles to Cleveland.
In the early morning of August 31st, the field of entrants lined up for the start was made up of ten P-38 Lightnings, four P-51 Mustangs, one Goodyear FG-1 Corsair, two Bell P-63 Kingcobras, and one Douglas A-26 Invader. Mantz had flown in three previous Bendix dashes and was a shrewd and highly-skilled competitor. His primary concern was whether his Mustang could outperform another Mustang in the field, the entry of aviatrix Jackie Cochran. Her aeroplane was a brand new factory-fresh example. He worried about that and about how he could carry enough fuel to average close to the 487 mph top speed his P-51 could achieve, without carrying drag-inducing drop tanks and without landing to refuel. He consulted another old friend about the problem, Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, who suggested plugging up the wings and filling them with fuel.
When people asked Mantz where he planned to land to refuel along the route, he told them truthfully that he was going to use ‘wet wings.’ Mantz and his team worked under wraps to prepare the P-51 in a hangar at Van Nuys airport in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles. He had painted the plane a deep crimson and named it Blaze of Noon, after a film on which he had recently worked.
A slide rule and a banana were suspended from strings tied in the cockpit of his Mustang that morning. All the engines of the entrants were running and the first to depart for Cleveland was the Corsair. Several others followed and then it was the turn of Blaze of Noon. As the red Mustang thundered into the air, and Mantz raised the landing gear, the aircraft suddenly began to buffet severely and slowed dangerously near to stalling. Knowing that the gear had a sequencing problem, he debated for a moment whether to circle for several hours to burn off fuel before trying an emergency landing, or to try something else. He chose the latter and climbed to 25,000 feet over the town of Palmdale in the high desert northeast of Los Angeles.
Pulling through the top of a loop, he seemed to lose control of the aeroplane in a snapping manoeuvre that sprang the landing gear down. He tried retracting the wheels once more and this time the gear came up properly. He was then able to head off for Cleveland, re-plotting his course and settling in for the long ride.
His worry about Jackie Cochran’s competition would be unwarranted. She came up against a 30,000-foot stack of thunderhead clouds over the Grand Canyon and tried to climb above the storm. Her engine quit as she ascended through 27,000 feet. She then headed down through the clouds flying on instruments at full speed. Some time later her problems were compounded when she jettisoned her drop tanks. The slipstream knocked them into the trailing edges of her wings, damaging the wings significantly.
Mantz was also flying on instruments and flat out. As he crossed over the Mississippi River he started a long descent through more thunderstorms, and finally flashed over the Cleveland airport at 500 miles an hour to win the 1946 race and the $10,000 prize with an average speed of 435 mph. He entered and won the 1947 and 1948 Bendix Trophy Races as well—the only pilot ever to win the event in three consecutive years.
The revival of the American National Air Races after the Second World War resulted in many war-surplus P-51s being converted to greater and lesser racing configurations. The racing flourished until 1950 when the Korean War halted it again. It resumed in 1953 for five years as an entirely military event. There were no races from 1958 through 1960, but they were again resumed for two more years in 1961.
National Championship Air Racing began at Reno, Nevada, in 1965, opening a new era in racing for the Mustang, which dominated and continues to dominate that event.
The memorable, highly modified Mustang, Frank Taylor’s P-51D ‘Dago Red’, appeared there and also achieved a new world’s speed record. The 42-year-old 3,000-hp Packard Merlin-equipped racer set a piston-engined aircraft mark of 517 mph.
For many years Robert A. ‘Bob’ Hoover served as the official starter of the Reno Air Races Unlimited Class events. The racing planes, mostly Mustangs, formed up each year line-abreast on Hoover’s P-51D Old Yeller and, when he was sat-ified that they were properly ordered, he would announce to them and the crowd below, “Gentlemen, you have a race!” He would then pull up sharply to circle overhead, ready to manage things in the event of an accident, while the competitors dove into the first turn.
For much of his career Bob Hoover flew as test/demonstration pilot for North American Aviation. Much of his time with the planemaker was spent impressing airshow crowds around the United States with what the Mustang could do in the hands of a truly exceptional airman. The 85-year-old now denies that he was born in a nest, but admits to having taught himself aerobatics when he learned to fly as a youngster at Nashville’s Berry Field before the war. He then joined the Tennessee National Guard and, after graduating from Army Pilot Training, was sent to England and on to North Africa.
Later, in Sicily, Hoover flew Spitfires with the 52nd Fighter Group and was shot down off the coast of southern France on his fifty-ninth mission. He spent the next sixteen months in the German prison camp Stalag Luft One at Barth on the Baltic near Stralsund. After the war Bob tested enemy aircraft for the Air Force at Wright Field, Ohio, and was hired by North American in 1950 to test their new jet fighters, the F-86 Sabre, FJ-2 Fury, and F-100 Super Sabre. He went to Korea during the war there to demonstrate the F-86 in dive-bombing missions. In more than fifty years of aviation, he has flown hundreds of aircraft types and performed thousands of spectacu-asts. He is probably the best-known airshow pilot in the world and one of the most accomplished, high-achieving pilots in history. The late General Jimmy Doolittle, referred to Hoover as: “. . . the greatest stick and rudder man who ever lived.”
In addition to the hundreds of Mustangs operated by U.S. Air National Guard and U.S.A.F. Reserve squadrons through the 1950s, more than 200 P-51Ds were built in Australia by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation near Melbourne after North American had ended its production. A further 300 were provided to Australia under a Lend-Lease agreement with the United States. Three Mustang-equipped squadrons were operated in Japan by the Australians as part of the Allied occupation after the Second World War. Additionally, the Royal Canadian Auxiliary Air Force ordered 130 Mustangs after the war for use into the 1950s and thirty were purchased by the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1951.
The Chinese Nationalist Air Force received fifty P-51Ds prior to the Japanese surrender in August 1945, but some of them were captured by the Chinese Communists. Thirty other air forces that operated Mustangs after the war included those of Sweden, Cuba, Israel, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatamala, Honduras, El Salvador, Bolivia, France, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Somalia, South Korea, and the Philippines.
In 1961, Trans-Florida Aviation Company of Sarasota, Florida, began a programme converting F-51D Mustangs to tandem two-seat executive aircraft. They called their product the Cavalier 2000 and tailored it for business types who wanted high-speed, long-range cruising coupled with the thrill of flight in a famous fighter plane. The Cavalier could subject its passenger to +9G at up to 490 mph with a cruise of 424 mph at 30,000 feet. It was equipped with twin 220-gallon wingtip fuel tanks for a 2,000-mile range and up to 400 pounds of luggage could be stored in what had been the wing gun bays. It was a relatively luxurious travel alternative for wealthy, and adventurous business types.
With American involvement in the Viet Nam war in the mid-1960s, the Cavalier people decided to offer a counterinsurgency version of their Mustang to the U.S. government. The 1,595-hp V-1650-7 Packard Merlin engine was replaced with a 1,760-hp British Merlin 620 and the aeroplane was made capable of carrying 4,000 pounds of underwing stores and, like the original P-51D, six .5 caliber machine guns in the wings. The P-51H taller tail fin was installed and the cockpit fitted with an ejection seat. By 1971, Trans-Florida had renamed itself Cavalier Aircraft Corporation and was producing a further advanced version of their Mustang called the Enforcer, a Lycoming turbine engined machine of 2,535 hp. None of these aircraft, however, were adopted by the U.S. Air Force.
By 1975, there were 148 P-51 Mustangs on the United States civil register, and several more in various stages of rebuilding and restoration. Massive gatherings of warbird aircraft at events such as the annual Experimental Aircraft Association meeting at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, attract dozens of Second World War planes, many of them Mustangs which continue to excite and inspire owners, pilots, and enthusiasts worldwide seven decades after their creation. Of the 15,875 Mustangs built, it is believed that upwards of 280 remain today with about 150 being airworthy.
The eighty-five-year-old Ed Schmued, the much admired and highly regarded designer of the Mustang, died in Oceanside, California, on June 1st 1985. An assemblage of aviation luminaries attended a memorial service two weeks later in the hangar of Clay Lacy Aviation at Van Nuys Airport, along with Ed’s widow Christel, his daughter Sandra and son Rolf. When they learned of his request that his ashes be flown out to sea in a Mustang, his greatest creation, six P-51 owners offered their aeroplanes for the purpose, along with the owner of an F-86 Sabre, North American’s jet successor to the Mustang. At the conclusion of the memorial service, a bugler played ‘Taps’ and the seven aircraft taxied slowly out to the runway with Lacy’s purple P-51 in the lead.
In the air the little formation turned south towards Los Angeles International Airport where it made a single low-level pass over the site of the old North American Aviation plant where the Mustang had been created. It then headed directly out to sea where Ed’s ashes were released as he had requested. Thirty minutes after they had taken off, the seven fighters were back on the ground at Van Nuys. The pilots on the flight were Clay Lacy, John Malone, Elmer Ward, Pete Regina, Skip Holm, Bob Guilford and Dave Zeuschel.
At the service it was mentioned that Ed’s proudest achievement was the Mustang and how proud he was that it had contributed so much to ending the war in Europe and had been designed by a man born in Germany, powered by an engine designed in Britain, and built on American soil. Tributes arrived from powerful aviation personages, among them General James H. Doolittle: “All of us who had the good fortune to know—and to know was to admire—Edgar Schmued—miss him profoundly,” and USAF General Chuck Yeager: “I, like a lot of other young fighter pilots, owe our necks to the design and performance that Ed put into that airplane [the P-51]. I was in the first P-51 group in the Eighth Air Force . . . the 357th Fighter Group. It was the best airplane in the skies anywhere in the world during WWII. Even during these days of high-tech airplanes, the P-51 Mustang is still a fun airplane to fly!”