ABOVE:
Crazy Horse leading
an F-22A Raptor
and F-15C Eagle in
a USAF Heritage
Flight formation.
Lee helped qualify
the Raptor for
participation in
the programme
when the Lockheed
Martin ‘air
dominance’ fighter
was first introduced
to these displays.
USAFAEROPLANE SEPTEMBER 2017 http://www.aeroplanemonthly.com 67he’s the founder of the professional
Horsemen routine, he’s involved in
the recovery of airplanes and finding
lost servicemen who have never
been accounted for. And he and Ed
are scary good when it comes to
formation flying! He puts his heart,
his soul and his support behind doing
it and doing it professionally, and I
couldn’t be happier that Berlin Express
is in Dan’s caring hands.”
Ed Shipley had experience from
ferrying TF-51D Miss Velma over for
The Fighter Collection exactly 10
years earlier. “We were comparing
notes”, says Lee. “At that time I said
to him, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’,
but now it was him calling me on
the ’phone to say, ‘What are you
doing?’ The whole key is to do it
safely, and what Dan brought to the
table was allowing me the team that
I needed to safely take the airplaneover 5,000nm. One of the things was
the support airplane. It took a lot
of the administrative load off of my
shoulders as far as the paperwork,
the flight planning and the customs
requirements were concerned.“It also provided an operational
team that became very important
to the mission. One of my brothers,
Richard Lauderback — one of the
twin brothers who’ve built Mustangs
for 40 years now — was key. ‘Little
John’ Muszala, who was instrumental
in building Berlin Express from scratch,
was too. My confidence level was
there. So we had one guy who knew
the airplane inside-out because he’d
helped build it and another guy who’s
been building Mustangs for over 40
years. That was the maintenance team.
Then there was Louis Horschel, whowas a very important known quantity
because of the formation requirements
of the mission. The two King Air
pilots weren’t military-trained, had
no formation experience and no
experience of the compatibilities and
the differences of the two airplanes.
But they were terrific, Kevin St
Germain and Kenny Patterson.
Rounding out the team was Justin
Shipley to document the mission from
start to finish. A great team!”
The whole timescale was incredibly
compressed. It took about three
weeks between the project first being
mentioned to Lee and the flight’s
scheduled completion. “When Ed
started talking about it and Dan made
the decision to bring the airplane over,
I thought they were talking about
Duxford in 2018. Richard, my brother,
had never had a passport in his life. We
had to expedite getting him one.62-70_AM_AEROMEETS_Sept17_cc C.indd 67 31/07/2017 11:04