set 1024 pix - "Attached is mine... with a P-40. He trained fighter pilots during the war, very talented in aerial gunnery, the deflection shot, and flew Mustangs toward the end. I learned after he died, young, early 50's, that trainers had a higher death rate than combat pilots... from mid air collisions, the most dangerous being from training pilots on their last course of close formation combat tactics, changing formation quickly and safely.
His bad day came from taking a wing of West Point pilots out for check out flight to do the basic left wing, right wing change over when you wanted to switch the most experienced pilots off to the side that would lead and attack.
It was a precise three step movement, but the pilot match to him on the other side did it in a only looping motion, coming up under my father's plane with his prop slicing into the fuel tank, exploding it into his cockpit and blowing my dad's plane up with hit rudder controls blown away and into a spin with his canopy jammed.
He managed to literally beak if off and jump, where he was so low his chute disintegrated from the speed, and he dropped 15 feet or so into a freshly plowed pasture. He had sprained ankles and that's all. The West Point pilot was dead, and the other two planes flowing them down reported no parachutes as my dad's was only open a split second.
He came from a poor Polish family, large, and we still can't figure out how he had gotten a pilot's license at fourteen, and a trucking company license at 16." Jim Dean.
