23 minute read
AEROPLANE MEETS DOUG ROZENDAAL
BELOW: Bombers old and new: the CAF Minnesota Wing’s B-25J Miss Mitchell, with Doug at the controls, leads a US Air Force B-52H from the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot AFB, North Dakota. USAF don’t finish’, he said. I said I was pretty committed to this. ‘Well’, he said, ‘I guess we could put you on the schedule’. He opened up this schedule book that was feet-deep, and it was showing some dates the following week. But I only had three months to do it in summer. I told him, ‘I was thinking tomorrow morning’. The guy said, ‘Oh, you’re serious’.
“In the summer of ’77 there was an unprecedented drought in central Iowa, and there was no work. I ran out of money, and I was getting frustrated. I didn’t get it done that summer, but the following spring — March, I think it was — I soloed, and I was very close, but didn’t quite get it finished up. The next spring I went back and got my private pilot’s licence in a Cessna 150.
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“After I graduated, I got a job and moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and got my instrument rating there. A couple of years later I moved back to Des Moines where I took a job with a British company, ICI. I took a job with ICI Americas selling agricultural chemicals, and they let me fly. Officially I was covering Iowa and the north half of Missouri, but I was really covering several states. I was renting a Cessna 182RG from my uncle, and life was grand. Then in 1984 my uncle who I was renting the airplane from came to me and said there was a lubricating oil business for sale in Mason City. He suggested I quit my job, he and I buy it, and go up there and run it. That’s what I did, but, starting a new business, cash was tight and I didn’t
have any reason to fly. I pretty much quit flying anything other than occasionally.
“One day I was driving home from work and there was a DC-3 parked at the airport. I slammed on the brakes, pulled into the airport, went to the café and there sat these two guys surrounded by all the usual suspects. I met Bob Harper, one of the owners of the airplane from Southwind Airlines in south Texas. They had arrived in our town to initiate FedEx service. Prior to 1986, we did not have overnight package service there. That DC-3 arrived, and its mission was to fly from Mason City to Des Moines, pick up the late freight in Des Moines, take it to Cedar Rapids and put it on a 727. They had gone from [Dassault] Falcons to 727s in Cedar Rapids and were dramatically expanding. I started riding along. We slept in sleeping bags in the back of the airplane.
“Bob Harper, the owner, was flying it. He said, ‘Man, you’ve done some real flying’. By that time I had about 800 hours, and flying as a salesman I had flown in pretty much any kind of weather. ‘If you had a multi-engine and a commercial, we would check you out as a co-pilot’. The next day I took my commercial pilot rating, stone-cold. I got an FAR [Federal Aviation Regulations] book, studied a little bit overnight and went and took the written test. Back in those days you had to wait six weeks to get the results. I waited the six weeks, the results came back, and miraculously I had passed.
“In the meantime, I had gotten a private multi-engine [licence], and the moment I got my results I got my commercial multi-engine. That weekend I got a Part 135 charter check-out and SIC [secondin-command] check in the DC-3. On the sly, they’d let me fly some. The primary responsibility of the co-pilot on that mission was to load and unload the airplane — 7,000lb of boxes up the hill, and back down when you unloaded. By now it was May 1986, and I was a co-pilot on a DC-3. That was my first tailwheel airplane.
“Autumn came, and with winter there was no hangar for the DC-3 at either Mason City or Cedar Rapids. It was going to be impossible to get through the winter without a hangar, so they split the run into two runs and put two Beech 18s on it. The local FBO [fixed-base operator] had a Beech 18 — his name was Jerry Dwyer, and he was, incidentally, the guy who owned the Beech Bonanza that Buddy Holly crashed in. That September, I began flying the ‘Twin Beech’ as captain, but I only had 900 hours total time so I could only fly VFR. I was scud-running at night in the wintertime over north Iowa, which was more than a challenge. But I flew the ‘Twin Beech’ part-time for almost 10 years.
“In the meantime, in 1989 I went to Harlingen, Texas, to see Bob Harper and Bob Steenbock of Southwind Airlines. They were based in Cameron County, Texas, right on the border and near Harlingen. They were involved with the Confederate Air Force, so I decided to go down there for the CAF Airsho, reunite with these guys and see what the CAF was all about. I had no understanding or real concept of warbirds or anything like that. My attraction was not to the warbirds — I was a farm kid, and it was to big trucks, big tractors, big machinery. That was the intrigue of it.
“I joined the CAF — interestingly enough, that was in the midst of its decision to move from Harlingen to Midland. There was a big, raucous discussion about it that I witnessed in the auditorium, and I realised it was a pretty lively organisation. Once home, I had heard there was a CAF B-25 in Minneapolis, 100 miles north of Mason City, that was under restoration, but I did not know anything about it and had no contacts up there. ❖
“In 1991 a cropduster customer/ friend of mine called me up one day. He owned a T-6, and said he’d met a guy at the Offutt airshow who was coming to Mason City to have lunch. Why didn’t we go together? [He] was an airline pilot from Minneapolis. He had a BT-13, so he flew it down and we went and had lunch. He said, ‘You’ve got this DC-3 and Beech 18 experience — you have to come up and see this B-25 we’ve got. You need to get involved in the Minnesota Wing of the CAF’.
“At that point I’d bought into a partnership in a Cessna 195, so I flew that up to South St Paul Airport. There was this beautiful B-25 in restoration and very close to getting ready to fly. On 18 April 1992, they started flying the airplane. I had made some extra money doing some sideline contract flying work, so I invested that in a sponsorship of the B-25. I quickly got checked-out as a co-pilot, but I had no aspirations of flying it as captain, ever. I was just a lowly, low-time guy and they had all these airline pilots with thousands of hours.
“What I didn’t understand was that my time in the Beech 18 and the DC-3 was incredibly valuable. I got in the B-25 and it was just like I’d died and gone to heaven. This is an airplane that’s considerably easier to fly than a Beech 18, and it has power. A Beech 18 at night, at gross weight or a little better, just has no power. I fell instantly in love with the B-25, and immediately got checkedout in the left seat. Then I started working the airshow industry hard, booking airshows for it, and flying it a lot in the summer of ’92 and ’93. That was really the beginning of my warbird career.
“It’s been an incredible run since then. One thing leads to another. I was the co-pilot when we flew Miss Mitchell over Arlington for Jimmy Doolittle’s burial; that was an incredible experience. We got a PBY, and I started flying that. Through airshows I got to know the ‘North Dakota mafia’, Gerry Beck, Bob Odegaard and all those guys, and became friends with them.
“The airport manager in Fort Dodge, Iowa called me up one day — I was booking the B-25 and developing relationships with all these airshow people. She said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for some warbirds for our airshow’. I told her we’d obviously got the B-25, and she wanted that, but she also wanted a fighter. I asked what her wish-list was. She told me her favourite airplane was the Corsair, so it would be fantastic if I could get one. I called Gerry Beck up and said, ‘Hey, Beck. They’ve got an airshow down here in Fort Dodge and they’re looking for a Corsair… What do you want to charge?’ He said, ‘Whatever’s fair. Are they charging admission?’ It was Fly Iowa, so it was free. So, he told me, ‘Give ’em a good deal’. I called up and negotiated a deal, and they agreed to it. I called Beck back: ‘Here’s the deal — put this on your calendar for next year.’
“About two hours later he called me back. His wife just informed him they had a conflict that weekend. I said I’d find somebody else with another airplane. ‘No, don’t do that’, he said. ‘Why don’t you get an LOA [letter of authorisation] in the Corsair and you can take the airplane to the airshow?’ Long pause… ‘Don’t **** with me, Beck’. ‘No, I’m serious. There’s some demand for this airplane and I
ABOVE: There were many good times to be had with the Texas Flying Legends Museum aircraft, such as taking part in this stack comprising the A6M2 Zero, P-40K Warhawk, P-51D Mustangs Dakota Kid II/Long Island Kid and Little Horse, the FG-1D Corsair and B-25J Mitchell. Doug was in the P-40.
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BELOW: Two ‘Red Tail’ P-51Cs in formation during Sun ’n Fun 2012, as Doug in the CAF aeroplane leads Kermit Weeks’ Ina The Macon Belle.
DAVID LEININGER don’t want to be doing that much. I need somebody to back me up’. OK. Spring comes around, and we’re getting ramped-up. I called Gerry and said I was going up for my T-6 recurrent next week. If I was going to get this letter in the Corsair, this would be a good time to start working on that. ‘But’, I said, ‘if you’ve come to your senses and changed your mind, I have not told a single, solitary soul about this… it won’t affect our friendship, and I’ll understand’. ‘No’, he told me. ‘You need to get a letter in the Corsair.’
“I did the T-6 check ride and got all signed off for the Corsair. I went up to North Dakota, spent some time in the cockpit and spent some time with Beck talking about it. Finally, it came time to pull it out and go fly. I got up in the airplane and got it cranked up, with Beck standing there watching. I taxied out, and he waved and went back to work in his shop. I went and flew it around, and it flew great. I made three landings and came taxiing back in. Everybody showed up from town because the Corsair was flying. When I got out of the airplane, they were all clapping. The main door in the hangar opened — Beck looked out, saw that his airplane was in one piece, closed the door and went back to work! That was who he was.
“The Minnesota Wing had this pile of scrap that was the bones of a C-model Mustang. There was a guy named Don Hinz, who was not a CAF member, but who was a retired naval aviator who had gotten out of the navy and started flying for the airlines. On the side he bought a garbage truck, and he decided he liked tipping cans better than flying airliners. He bought several more garbage trucks and became incredibly successful. He sold his refuse business, bought some Marchettis [SIAI-Marchetti SF260s] and started a ‘laser-tag’ combat business at our airport. I knew Don, but not well, and Don knew we had this Mustang. Bob Odegaard by now had figured out how to extrude spars, and the wings of this airplane had been cut off. Prior to that it wasn’t really a candidate for restoration, because there just weren’t any spars. The Minnesota Wing raised a little money and sent the wing up to North Dakota to get it restored.
“Don Hinz witnessed some things in the navy regarding the way African-American pilots had been treated that he wasn’t very proud of. He knew we were trying to restore this airplane as a Tuskegee Airmen airplane. He came onto the scene, joined the CAF and took charge of the project. Don was a visionary leader with infectious energy. He brought the same level of enthusiasm to the ‘Red Tail’ project, and when he got involved, I knew we had a winning team and I wanted to be on it. When it was still a heap of corroded aluminum on the ground, I sponsored the P-51.
“Don understood that to be successful it had to be more than just another cool Mustang. He had the vision it could be an education programme — that we were going to inspire young people. In short order we had a flying airplane. From Don’s initial involvement in the project until its first flight was maybe three years. We were going backwards and forwards to Wahpeton, doing the restoration, so I got really close to Beck and Odegaard. By now I was flying their airplanes.
“We formed the Red Tail Squadron, got the P-51C flying in 2001 and got affiliated with some teachers. We were working on curriculum development, bringing
the story of the Tuskegee Airmen into schools. Well, we found out pretty quickly that neither schools nor school boards had much interest in what airplane drivers had to say about what should be taught in their schools. We were failing miserably. Even when we got the airplane flying, we were still failing miserably.
“Then came Memorial Day in 2004. We were into the Red Wing Airshow [at Red Wing Airport], which was the Minnesota Wing’s home show. Don was flying the Mustang, I was flying the B-25, and he came on the radio to say the engine was quitting. I think everybody knows the story there. He didn’t make the runway, put it in a field, tore the wing off and he died. I became the de facto leader of the project. We loaded the parts up, took them back to North Dakota and started raising money. There was a guy who was involved in politics and got wind of our story. He told me we really needed to get involved in direct mail. I went to CAF headquarters and said we wanted to try a direct mail campaign. They agreed, somewhat hesitantly, and it began to flourish. Now I was saying the curriculum thing wasn’t working — the schools were never going to let us come in and dump a programme in their lap. We had to figure out a different way to get to these young people we wanted to inspire.”
When long-time CAF instructor and examiner Randy Sohn persuaded Doug to get an instructor’s rating of his own, it proved something of a revelation. “The first sentence in the old ‘red book’, the flight instructor handbook, said, ‘The definition of learning is a change of behaviour as a result of experience’. I thought, ‘Wow, now there’s a concept’. I dug into this, and it changed the way I ran my business, the way I
motivated my employees. It was transformational.
“We were trying to develop this education project. We needed to do something that rose to the level of an experience. I looked back at my own life: what were the experiences that had an impact on me growing up, which were exciting and immediately come to mind? I have asked literally hundreds of flight instructor applicants: what organisation in America is best in class and has no peer at creating experiences?” The answer: Disney. “We needed to create Disneyland in some sort of a mobile venue that we could take to schools. I drew up a concept for a mobile exhibition trailer, and at airshows I would go look at all the other exhibition trailers that you walk through to see what they had. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to […] put people in there, turn off the lights and ‘own’ them for 15 or 30 minutes.
“In the five years the ‘Red Tail’ was down, we were trying to raise money for this exhibit. My plan was to charge airshows for the appearance and appear with the airplane and the exhibit at the airshow. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we would go to a school for free. We would control the message in the exhibit. We were promoting the airshow, we were giving the airshow a connection with the community, we were giving the airshow an education outreach arm. That was the vision.
“In 2009 we got the airplane put back together after Don’s accident. I had the opportunity to develop close personal relationships with numerous original Tuskegee Airmen, most notably Charles McGee. Charles became a close family friend, and I’m still in contact with his son and daughter. I spoke at his 90th birthday party, I spoke at
ABOVE: Closing in on the camera-ship with the Texas Flying Legends’ P-40K 42-10256, an exSoviet machine.
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TOP: Just one of the memorable scenes from the D-Day Squadron’s 2019 European tour, as Doug and That’s All Brother lead Eric Zipkin at the helm of the Tunison Foundation’s C-47A Placid Lassie, and Hugo Mathys’ C-47. RICHARD PAVER MIDDLE: Piloting C-47A That’s All Brother on its maiden post-restoration flight, on 31 January 2018. JIM KOEPNICK ABOVE: That’s All Brother leads a specially marked US Air Force C-130J from the 37th Airlift Squadron at Ramstein over Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, on 8 June 2019. USAF his 100th birthday party. He was just a man to aspire to, and it’s certainly humbling to realise that, if that’s the standard, I fall so miserably short. He is one of the finest people that ever walked across the face of the planet. I learned so much from him. I can’t overstate the impact that my relationship with him had on my life. Such a kind man — for all the things he endured, he always saw the positives in all of it.”
By now, Doug was active in a broader range of aircraft. He participated in US Navy Legacy Flight displays, both in the Corsair and the CAF’s F6F Hellcat, while he was one of the very few pilots to fly Bob Odegaard’s sensational F2G Super Corsair. And there were more to come. “Henry Reichert had a Mustang, Dakota Kid, that Warren Pietsch was going to sell for him. I needed to renew my aerobatic card, and I called Warren up — he was an aerobatic competency evaluator. I thought I’d fly up the next day. ‘Hey, that’d be great’, he said, ‘because I’ve got some guy coming here to have a look at the Mustang. You come up here and we’ll show him a good time’.
“I flew up to Minot, North Dakota, in my Rocket, I renewed my aerobatic card with Warren, and this guy showed up. He was there representing a billionaire from Houston who was interested in buying a Mustang… Lo and behold, the day after that, before we left he had bought this airplane for his boss, and we were going to crew it for him. That was the birth of Texas Flying Legends.
“He bought a whole bunch of airplanes, a hangar in Houston, and Warren and I created a formation warbird team — B-25, Corsair, two Mustangs, ultimately a Spitfire. That was an incredible deal. We did two airshows in St Barts, we did all kinds of things. It took on a whole life of its own. But it was becoming too much, and I stepped back from it. A year or two after that, it fell apart. The owner had scratched that itch, and Warren liquidated all those airplanes for him. Bruce Eames still has part of that collection, and I’ve flown some of those airplanes for Bruce — the Spitfire and the Hurricane.”
A particularly historic C-47 has been the subject of an even longer association. “Twenty-something years ago, a friend of mine called me up and said he was going to
buy a DC-3. Could I check him out on it? He bought it, and it was out in Arizona… I got him trained up, called in an examiner, got him a type rating and we flew it back to Iowa. I flew it with him for several years, but then he’d kind of scratched that itch and flew it down to Casa Grande, Arizona, and parked it there.
“Fast-forward now to probably seven or eight years after he bought it; he called me up and said, ‘Why don’t you buy my DC-3?’ I laughed — first of all, I didn’t have a place to put it, and you can’t leave it outside in the Midwest or it’ll get torn up. Secondly, I had no use for it, and I didn’t have a team of mechanics to take care of it. He’d figured that, so he was going to sell it to Basler. But he wasn’t current any more, so he asked if I could ferry it with him to Oshkosh. We went to Casa Grande and spent a day working on the airplane to get it all up and running. It flew flawlessly, and we took it all the way to Oshkosh and parked it.
“I am not ashamed to say I had tears in my eyes when I walked away from it, because it was going to get chopped in half and stretched and have turbines put on it and all of that. You know, this was an airplane I had a lot of history with. Every year at Oshkosh I’d be flying in the airshow, I’d look down and there was ’847, or ‘Puff ’ as we called it — it was in Vietnam gunship colours, and it had these big dummy guns that poked out the windows.
“One day I was sitting right here at my desk when the ’phone rang. It was Steve Brown, who was president of the CAF at the time. He said they thought they’d found the lead airplane from D-Day. ‘Really, where?’ ‘At Basler’. ‘Which one?’ ‘’847’. I told him I knew that airplane — I’d flown it there. I was on the board of directors then, and we made a deal with Basler to buy the airplane. Being here in northern Iowa I’m close to Basler, so I was heavily involved, running back and forth. The CAF raised the money and restored it to like-new condition. I got to do the first flight on it.”
With the name That’s All Brother and in service with the 87th Troop Carrier Squadron, C-47A 42-92847 had on the night of 5-6 June 1944 led the seventh serial of Mission ‘Albany’, the first element carrying the main body of paratroopers after those that dropped the pathfinders into battle. In June 2019 it memorably returned to Europe for six weeks of D-Day and Berlin Airlift commemorations, as part of the D-Day Squadron led by Eric Zipkin.
“It was an incredible experience on so many different levels”, says Doug. “I met Eric Zipkin the first time when we were in St Barts. He operates an airline down there, and we needed our pilots to be ferried back to St Barts for a reception after one of our airshows. Eric took us in his PC-12. I didn’t really take him too seriously — he was just a rich guy who drove turbines and smelled of kerosene. When Eric started to put together the D-Day Squadron to go to Europe, I saw there was more to him than I’d realised. Over the course of the year, he and I became very close, lifelong friends.
“People said, ‘Aren’t you worried about flying a DC-3 across the North Atlantic?’ I’d say I have a brand-
new airplane, with 150 hours on it. It was well broken-in, it would fly on one engine, and it was going to be cold weather, so overheating was not a worry. I was mostly concerned about taking 75 type-A people and putting them under stress in close confinement. That was a psychological experiment. But Eric’s leadership style proved to be successful herding those cats, and corralling all that ego and pointing it in the right direction. I can’t say enough about how critical he was to the success of that mission.”
The DC-3/C-47 family has been a big part of Doug’s life. His goal is to still be flying them in 2036, the year after the type’s centenary, so he can mark a personal halfcentury of ‘Dak’ operations. But his time on other types is scarcely less considerable, and as an FAA specialty examiner covering most fighters, the B-25 and PBY, he’s much involved in training the next generation, too. In turn, Doug’s used his experience to further the cause of flight safety, whether in warbirds, homebuilts, or many other genres of aircraft.
One story in particular takes him back to flying Gerry Beck’s Corsair for the first time. “I got out of the airplane with everybody congratulating me, all excited, and walked into the hangar. Beck was over on his toolbox, working on one of the gadgets he was so famous for. He asked, ‘So, what do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, it was really cool, but it wasn’t really a big deal’. He put his glasses down and replied, ‘If it was a big deal, you shouldn’t be here’.
“I’ve told that to an untold number of people I’ve checked-out on fighters since then. If you’re properly prepared, it’s not a big deal. These airplanes were flown by 19-year-old kids with less than 200 hours’ total time. Anybody who tells you they’re hard to fly is probably trying to pad their own ego. Some of them have some idiosyncrasies and all of that, but for the most part, the reason why they were good fighters is because they were relatively easy to fly and could be flown well by low-time pilots.”
No wonder, then, that Doug gets such interest and pleasure from pretty much everything he flies. “I can find redeeming qualities in almost any airplane. Each one has something to teach you, and if you can store those in your database of experiences then you don’t get surprised very often.”
LEFT: CAF Red Tail Squadron pilots Brad Lang, Doug, Alan Miller, Paul Stojkov and Bill Shepard with the Hinz family on the occasion of the late Don Hinz being inducted into the CAF Hall of Fame. C AF
