BELOW:
The early days of
Lee’s flying, with
Cessna 150 N3087X
in Orlando, Florida.
VIA LEE L AUDERBACKTOP RIGHT:
During 1970, Lee
met Bob Hoover
when the famed
combat, test and
demonstration pilot
was flying P-51 Ole
Yeller. Much later,
the pair were to fly
Mustangs together,
and Lee sometimes
displays this very
machine.
VIA LEE L AUDERBACKMIDDLE RIGHT:
Working as chief
pilot for golfing
legend Arnold
Palmer.
VIA LEE L AUDERBACKBOTTOM RIGHT:
A memorable
trip with Arnold
Palmer in a Grob
G103 glider. The
inscription to Lee
reads, “A great job
as always”.
VIA LEE L AUDERBACK64 http://www.aeroplanemonthly.com AEROPLANE SEPTEMBER 2017with ‘The Boss’ almost 18 years,
flying the Lear, most of the Citation
series airplanes and the MD500E
helicopter.”
Palmer was one of the highest-
profile proponents of corporate
aviation. “He was a terrific pilot”,
recalls Lee. “I would attribute it to
hand-eye co-ordination, as with so
many professional athletes. He wasn’t
a technical pilot, he was a stick-and-
rudder guy. Going into New York-
LaGuardia in a blowing snowstorm
in a Lear 24 with no reversers, he was
absolutely right on it.
“And we had a great time. We did
many flights together over 18 years,
some of them international. My first
Atlantic crossing was to Prestwick
with him in a Citation 650, for him
to play in the British Open. Our
friendship went on from start to finish;
he passed away last year, and it was a
big loss in my life.
“I retired from working for ‘The
Boss’ in 1990. I just couldn’t keep the
pace going any more — he wore me
out! What had happened was that
two of my brothers, the identical
twins Peter and Richard, came out
of the Air Force and started working
on corporate airplanes. One of the
corporate guys bought a P-40 that
had been up in the Aleutian Islands,
and another bought a Mustang. They
started working on warbirds, and
focusing more and more on rebuilding
them. At one time in the early ’80s,
one of the identical twins was working
on a P-40 project for a guy, and the
other identical twin was working on
a P-40 project for another guy, in
the same hangar at Orlando. Once I
watched them get in a fist-fight over
whose parts were going on whose
airplane!
“In 1976 I’d had a chance to fly a
dual-control TF Mustang out of King
City with Gordon Plaskett. I’d been
flying T-6s and all sorts of different
things. I truly fell in love with itAEROPLANE MEETS... LEE LAUDERBACK
and thought, ‘Wow, this is what I’m
supposed to do in life’. I tried to
figure it out; I even tried to convince
Arnold Palmer that maybe we should
have a P-51.“How it happened was that in
1987 a former business partner of
mine, Doug Schultz, realised that the
US Naval Test Pilot School had a
contract for what they call qualitative
evaluation work. They wanted their
test pilot students to experience
something that isn’t state-of-the-
art, that isn’t all sorted out, and had
propeller torque effects. The TF- 51
was ideal. It’s totally different to
what they’re used to, and by today’s
standards it has many deficiencies. We
identified a dual-cockpit, dual-control
Mustang that met their requirement,
told the bank we had a contract, told
the military we had an airplane, and
everything passed in the middle of
the night”. Based then as now at
Kissimmee, Florida, that was the start
of Stallion 51.
“When I retired from Mr Palmer in
1990”, Lee continues, “I started reallybuilding the whole programme. I
ended up buying my partner out of the
business; he wanted to do more jets,
and I was so enamoured, as I totally
am today, with the Mustang. That’s
when we started doing the formal
check-out training programmes, the
orientation flying, the airshow work.
“I learned to fly the Mustang in a
test pilot environment, and there were
so many lessons learned — we were
spinning the airplane, departing the
airplane, doing all kinds of off-the-
wall stuff. The accident record of
the Mustang in its early years with
civilian pilots was very, very poor.
They were losing something like 10
per cent of these airplanes every year,
because you’d have inexperienced
pilots without good training flying
a high-performance military fighter.
Stallion 51 recognised the need for
a good training programme, so we
took the lessons learned from the
Test Pilot School and developed an
FAA-approved training syllabus to do
that. We developed the entire business
around that premise, and we’re still
doing that 30 years later.“All I wanted to do was be in the
military and fly fighters. This was
a back-door approach to that. It
checked that box for me. I would sit
on the wing of the Mustang, and a
kid who flies an F/A-18 would come
along and say, ‘I’d give it all up to
fly the P-51’. Five years later they’re
probably not flying, they’re in a desk
job, while I’ve been flying the P-51 for
well over 30 years.”
The TF-51D with which Stallion
51 was formed, 44-84745/N851D,
was one of only six such dual-control
examples in the world at that time.
“Nobody really wanted the airplane”,
Lee remembers, “because it wasn’t a
‘stock’ fighter and it was the highest-
priced Mustang ever. Today at that
price it would be the bargain of the
century. Fast-forward 30 years and
everybody wants a TF. I think we
helped change that image.”
The company named that first
Mustang Crazy Horse. “It’s still my
favourite of all the Mustangs I’ve
flown. It’s like putting on your old
pair of loafers — you’ve got to dust
’em off, and they’re not bright and
shiny, but you can wear them allday and they feel great”. A second,
44 - 74502/N351DT, followed in 2005.
“We realised that, for operational
requirements, we couldn’t take
‘Horse One’ and completely restore
it. My brothers had actually rebuilt a
Mustang into a TF for a gentleman,
and he ended up putting it on the
market. We bought it, and the
dilemma became how we were going
to paint it. Crazy Horse was such a
well-known airplane — there are
thousands and thousands of people
who have flown it — and it was on
all our merchandising and everything.
So we just made it Crazy Horse^2. That
turned out to be a very good business
decision”. With 44-74497/N51LW
Little Witch also operated for its owner,
Stallion 51 has three machines at its
disposal.
“There are”, Lee describes, “two
different categories of people. There
are students of the programme, who
come in and train and maybe stop at
some point in that programme. Then
there are what we call graduates, who
have checked every box in a very rigid
syllabus. Nobody gets a pass; youI’d like to think that, in 30 years, we at
Stallion 51 have had a dramatic impact on the
safety of the Mustang. Our graduates have
had a terrific safety record
62-70_AM_AEROMEETS_Sept17_cc C.indd 64 31/07/2017 11:02