Aeroplane September 2017

(Brent) #1
70 http://www.aeroplanemonthly.com AEROPLANE SEPTEMBER 2017

that was nice. I put all of my survival
gear away and got back into my
parachute.
“It was a two-hour leg, just over
490nm. It was nothing to be taken
lightly, and we didn’t. That was a good
thing. We were all ready for take-off,
and the tower said, ‘Stand by’. There
was an emergency in progress with
a helicopter, and they told us to taxi
back to the ramp and shut down.
Well, the weather kept on getting
a little bit worse. I was thinking,
‘Come on, let’s get going here’. By the
time the helicopter got safely on the
ground and they’d put the fire trucks
away, it delayed us about 45 minutes.
“We took off and started out en
route at 12,000ft. It was getting
darker and cloudier, and we began
to get in some clouds. My job was to
stay right on the wing of the King
Air, flying a pretty tight formation,
because he was like my flight director.
He turns left, I go with him, he turns
right, I go with him. We were now at
12,000ft in IFR conditions. I could

see the other side of the King Air. I
wasn’t too concerned.
“But then we started picking up
a little bit of icing, which isn’t good
for the P-51. The King Air’s fine, but
the Mustang has no real anti-icing
equipment. We were forced to go
down to a lower altitude, and Louis
was instrumental in the decision-
making.

“We descended to 8,000ft, which
took us underneath the freezing
level. That was going pretty well for
a while. Then we picked up a little
light precipitation, and we started
deviating. What had happened was
that with the time delay, the rain
showers began developing quickly,
so our clear path was going away.
It required major deviations to get
around that.
“With its radar and everything, the
King Air was steering the mission. I
was going, ‘OK, this is manageable.
It can’t get much worse than this’.

But the clouds got a little bit thicker,
and now I could only see pieces of
the King Air at times. Louis kept
throwing me little titbits of hope,
like, ‘75 miles ahead there is some
sunshine’. After 150 miles, I was
going, ‘Hey, where’s that sunshine?’
“We ended up stepping down
lower and lower, some of it due to air
traffic control, and some of it due to
having to find better weather. There
were several seconds at a time that I
was not flying off the King Air any
more, but just his wingtip. All of a
sudden we hit turbulence, and we were
both getting jockeyed around. After
a lot of concentration, just hanging
with the King Air, we saw a bit of an
improvement. I was on the wing for an
hour and a half, virtually never seeing
the ground through the clouds, which
isn’t something I do every day...
“We made Duxford in something
like 2.7 hours. I went behind the
airfield, held for a few minutes and
then did a couple of passes before I
landed.
“It was quite the adventure. I kept
thinking on the way over of all the
servicemen who did this without
a GPS, without an escort aircraft,
without all the weather resource. You
really have to take your hat off to
them. It was a real honour to be able
to do this. I couldn’t be more proud
of the team of people that made it
happen. There was a lot of ground
support, there was a lot of airborne
support. I just happened to be the guy
driving the Mustang.”
P-51s aside, in his 22,000-hour
flying career to date Lee has flown
the Corsair, Sea Fury, Spitfire,
Bearcat and P-38. He’s had time in
two-seat military jets like the F-15,
F-16 and F/A-18, enjoying back-seat
rides with both the Thunderbirds
and Blue Angels. But, he says, “My
heart is in the Mustang”. Through
Stallion 51, a lot of other pilots
have experienced the joy of North
American’s great fighter
for themselves, and so much
of that is thanks to Lee.

ABOVE:
Members of the
Operation Berlin
Express team on
Cambridgeshire soil.
From left to right,
Richard and Lee
Lauderback, Louis
Horschel and John
Muszala II.
THE FRIEDKIN GROUP

BELOW RIGHT:
Very much IFR
conditions en
route from Wick to
Duxford.
THE FRIEDKIN GROUP

BELOW:
On the wing of the
Beechcraft King Air
350 support aircraft,
a crucial element of
the whole trans-
Atlantic plan.
LEE LAUDERBACK

AEROPLANE MEETS... LEE LAUDERBACK


62-70_AM_AEROMEETS_Sept17_cc C.indd 70 31/07/2017 15:03

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