July 1, 2008 — Finally! The Dayton Air Show: A Photographic Celebration is in stores and we have some book discussions scheduled — one with air show superstar and National Aviation Hall of Fame nominee Sean D. Tucker. Here's where you can find us in the coming weeks:

• Ty Greenlees and Timothy R. Gaffney will discuss our book on Wednesday, July 9, at 5 p.m. in the Vandalia Kroger Store, 780 Northwoods Blvd. (Kroger is selling the book in its stores.)

• Sean will join us on Wednesday, July 16, at 7 p.m. in Books and Company at The Greene, 4453 Walnut St. in Beavercreek. This will come just before the 2008 Vectren Dayton Air Show at Dayton International Airport on July 19-20, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame enshrinement Ceremony on July 19. Sean will fly in the air show and be inducted in the enshrinement ceremony.

•Ty and I will appear again at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 16, at the Dayton Metro Library’s Main Library, 215 E. Third St.

Books are available in Kroger stores, Books and Co., and other local bookstores. It will also be available during the air show at the air show's merchandise booth. If you just can't wait, order it online.

Tags: air shows, Sean D. Tucker, Ty Greenlees, Timothy R. Gaffney

Over the years, Ty Greenlees has become an accomplished air-to-air photographer. It isn't easy, and it isn't for the sqeamish.
For starters, you need as much visibility as possible, with no plexiglass distorting your view of aircraft you're trying to photograph. The ideal shooting platform is an airplane with a big, wide door that can be removed for photo flights. Lucky for Ty, Sean D. Tucker has just such an airplane — a Piper Seneca — and a terrific photo pilot in Brian Norris, his announcer. When Sean is flying at the Vectren Dayton Air Show, he and Brian work with the local news media to arrange air-to-air photo opportunities. Sean always welcomes other air show pilots to fly in formation with him.



Sitting on the floor of the open cabin, strapped in like helicopter door gunners, the photographers have an unrestricted view out the big side door. The picture above is one I snapped of Ty and another photographer in 1999 in the back of Sean's Cherokee Six, which preceded his Seneca.



Here's how the photo plane looked when I flew in the back seat of Mary Dilda's SNJ "Two of Hearts" in a 2004 photo flight.

Air-to-air photography requires careful planning and teamwork — not just to get a good photo, but for safety. Flying in close formation with other airplanes demands training and discipline. Sean works with professional aerobatic pilots who know how to do it safely. Before a photo flight, he gathers everyone for a briefing, and they all walk through the maneuvers they will make during the flight.
The photographer also needs to understand how formation flying works so he understands what the pilots are doing and interact with them to set up his shots. This is a skill I watched Ty develop to a high degree over the years.

Tags: air shows, Ty Greenlees

March 15 update: Parachutes gallery added!

Even a book has only so much space. Ty had to make a lot of tough choices when he selected pictures for our book, Dayton Air Show: A Photographic Celebration. Chad DeBoard, Orange Frazer's graphic designer, had to be even more selective when he made the pages.

The winnowing process left Ty with a pile of great pictures that just didn't fit into the book. So, he did the next best thing: He selected some of his favorites for photo galleries that we're going to put on this website.

First up: military jets.

Speaking of miljets, here we are in the Dayton Daily News company jet at an '80s air show. ... Yeah, right.

Tags: air shows, Ty Greenlees, Dayton Air Show Book

If you want a humbling experience, try giving a talk about aviation history at the Engineers Club of Dayton. You'll find a polite, friendly crowd of people who made or witnessed a good deal of what you're trying to lecture them on. The fact that one of the club's co-founders was Orville Wright should give you a clue.

So it was on Tuesday when I agreed to fill in for a luncheon speaker who cancelled. I shamelessly plugged the air show book by using material from the introductory chapter for a speech about the history of air shows in Dayton.

I traced the tradition of air shows all the way back to Huffman Prairie in 1904, where the Wright brothers continued their powered-flight experiments after Kitty Hawk and later established a flying school, where Orville trained most of the Wright Company's exhibition team in 1910. I explained how World War I prompted the development of military airfields around Dayton, including what became Wright and Patterson Fields, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

With the military fields came air carnivals or circuses, later dubbed fairs or open houses. The biggest of all was an Army Air Forces Fair on Wright Field in October 1945, where the Army unveiled its newest technology as well as German and Japanese warplanes that had been captured during the war and spirited to Wright Field for analysis. More than a million people from around the world swarmed Wright Field for a week to gawk at all the formerly secret hardware.

Leave it to an Engineers Club member to have firsthand knowledge about those open houses. Jack Darst not only knew about them, he had worked as a teenager in a concession stand at a Wright Field open house in 1945. Jack recalled that a plane had crashed, killing several people. All he remembered about the airplane was that it had a canard. The only canard-equipped plane I knew of from that era was one called the Ascender. Jack went home, Googled it, and almost instantly found a reference to the crash.

The airplane was the Curtiss XP-55 Ascender, a radical design with swept wings, a canard, and a pusher-type engine — the reason for its tongue-in-cheek nickname. Indeed, an XP-55 crashed at a Wright Field open house in 1945 — but one on May 27, not the October event. I wanted to know more, but an intensive Internet search turned up few details. Most references parroted the few remarks in Wikipedia's entry about the Ascender. You can find history books about Wright-Patterson online, but those histories are selective — you won't find much about crashes, crimes, or the like.

But the Dayton Metro Library has a good newspaper collection on microfilm, and I quickly found stories about the crash from the front pages of the Dayton Daily News, the Journal and the Herald. Since there's so little information about this crash on the Internet, I thought I'd report what I found.

The event was a day-long open house and War Loan rally. According to newspaper reports, 100,000 or more people attended the Sunday event. They watched a C-46 Commando snag a glider and yank it into tow, and they were the first civilians to get a peek inside the B-29 Superfortress. Heavy bombers flew overhead, including the massive, one-of-a-kind Douglas XB-19. Legendary war aces Maj. Richard "Dick" Bong and Capt. Dominic "Don" Gentile flew fighter demonstrations — Bong in a P-38 Lightning and Gentile in a P-51 Mustang. Lt. Steve Pisanos flew a P-59 Airacomet, the Army's futuristic, jet-powered fighter.

At 4 p.m., several fighter pilots lined up for a flyby. According to an eyewitness account by Capt. John Ducas, squeezed into the back of Bong's P-38, five fighters were to fly over the field in single-file formation, led by Capt. William C. Glasgow, 28, of Niagara Falls, NY. Glasgow was a combat veteran who had been shot down over Germany, taken prisoner and escaped. He held the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and an Air Medal with six oak leaf clusters. He was flying the XP-55

"After completing the pass across the field, we were to make a slow roll and then continue the direction of flight," Ducas wrote in an account published by the papers. Glasgow made his roll, and then the plane "seemed to wobble to the right and left, almost completing a second roll." Bong began his pass, then suddenly turned away. Bong gestured toward the ground; Dugan looked down and saw "a mass of red flames and then a second later the inferno was engulfed by black smoke." According to other witnesses, Glasgow's plane "swooped close to the ground and tore off 150 feet of fence" near Airway Road. The plane "burst into flames and began falling apart."

At that moment, local resident Wesley Roehm was turning his car around on Airway to take his family and a friend to the show. The XP-55 "sideswiped" the car and splashed gasoline on it before breaking into pieces and crashing into a ditch across the road. The gasoline ignited, engulfing the car and its occupants in flames. Roehm and a friend, Kathleen Eyre, died; Roehm's wife Susan and their two children were critically burned. Whether they survived or died later, I don't know.

This XP-55 was the third of only three built, according to Wikipedia. The first crashed in 1943 when it flipped over in a stall test and went into an uncontrolled, inverted descent. The pilot was able to bail out, but the plane was destroyed. After Glasgow's crash, the Army apparently lost interest in the last remaining Ascender; it eventually became the property of the National Air and Space Museum, which displayed it for many years before loaning it to the Kalamazoo Air Zoo in Michigan, where it was restored and remains on display.

The National Museum of the United States Air Force, which sits on old Wright Field where Glasgow died, has a brief fact sheet about the Ascender on its website. It doesn't mention the crash.

Tags: Dayton Air Show Book, Curtiss XP-55, Wright Field, air shows, Dayton

The air show management team scheduled a press conference. It would be held in the Modern Flight Gallery of the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Better yet, Sean D. Tucker, the air show's headline civilian act for 2008, would be there. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I asked the air show managers if we could announce our book as a part of the press conference — a small part. They agreed. Cool.

But the spirits would be restless.

The Vectren Dayton Air Show press conference took place Tuesday morning (1/29/08), right in front of the museum's new F-22A Raptor exhibit. It made a great backdrop for Air Show General Manager Brenda Kerfoot to announce the Air Force Raptor demo will be coming to the show on the July 19-20 weekend at Dayton International Airport.

Of course, Sean was a big part of the announcement. Not only will Sean fly his Oracle Challenger biplane at this year's show, he will be bringing his new team, the Collaborators Formation Aerobatic Team, with Ben Freelove, Bill Stein, and Sean's son Eric.

That wasn't all. On the same weekend, the National Aviation Hall of Fame will induct Sean into its prestigious ranks of enshrinees. He will join Patty Wagstaff, another living air show legend, who was inducted in 2004. This is personally exciting for me, because I think they are both the best of the best among air show performers. In our chapter on solo air show performers, Sean and Patty have a subchapter.

Sean will be inducted with three others: Retired Air Force Col. Col. Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson, World War II triple ace and experimental test pilot; Herbert D. Kelleher, co-founder, former CEO, and executive chairman of Southwest Airlines, and William A. Moffett, architect of naval military aviation.

Retired Air Force Col. Gerald K. "Robbie" Robinson, hall of fame chairman, got up to speak about this year's enshrinements, which take place at a black-tie gala described as the "Oscars night of aviation." That's when the museum's spirits seemed to get restless. One by one, the poster-size portraits of the enshrines started leaping off their easels, as if trying to fly. Every time Hall of Fame director Ron Kaplan or Air Show director Terry Grevious retrieved one, another would launch itself.

The culprit might have been the the museum's air ventillation system, which even stirred the Wright "B" Flyer hanging nearby, but it was more fun to assume ghosts were at play.

I felt a bit chagrined, though; the spirits didn't seem to think our book poster worth launching.

After the press conference, Ty Greenlees hauled Sean and me back to the Hall of Fame's learning center for group photos.

Tags: Dayton Air Show Book, air shows, Sean D. Tucker, Timothy R. Gaffney, Ty Greenlees