Vern And The Unknown Fairchild Pilot

When a pilot reaches a certain age, those old shoeboxes of black and white photos merit consideration. And questions. Can you identify the pilot in this photo, asks Paul Berge.

On cryptocurrency exchanges one picture buys a thousand words, but magazines pay cash for words, so here’s a thousand about one photo I took in 1976 at Watsonville, California Muni (WVI). I was in college and attending my first fly-in. Despite tramping around airports since I was a kid, I was unaware that pilots routinely gathered for weekend bacchanalia, chock-a-block with aircraft unlike the Cessnas I flew and those poorly. The airplane in the photo is the Fairchild PT-19 in which I took my first open-cockpit flight from a pilot whose name I never learned. I’ve previously written about this airplane, but my search for the pilot’s identity continues.

Watsonville sits five miles inland from Monterey Bay’s kelp-strewn beaches and 50 miles southeast of San Francisco airport, which isn’t worth visiting. Why? No grass runways. Try instead, Half Moon Bay (HAF), southwest of SFO. No grass runways either, but much friendlier. Both HAF and WVI were military fields during World War II. Initially, the Army ran HAF but handed it to the Navy, which later bequeathed it to San Mateo County after VJ Day in a War Assets Administration round of, “Airport, airport, who’s got the airport?”

Watsonville was a wartime Navy base and decommissioned shortly thereafter when communities across the country inherited large chunks of “what’re we gonna do with rubber-scuffed runways pointing to nowhere?” The answer is best imagined using Ed Herlihy’s 1946 newsreel voice: “…runways that once sent fighters and bombers to war, now launch modern civilian aeroplanes, such as this spiffy Ercoupe, toward the future!” Music up over B-roll of the Coupe and dissolve to the B-17 scrapyard scene from Best Years of Our Lives.

Officially, Watsonville Muni did not have grass runways, but during its annual fly-in—or whenever the manager, Vern Ackerman, wasn’t looking—the grass infield served taildraggers unsuited for pavement. “Taildragger” means airplanes with tailskids, little more than a chunk of wood beneath the tail, dragging in the weeds. Generally low maintenance. If you break a skid, just whittle a replacement from a tree and return to service (RTS). Paperwork to follow.

Ackerman, like any proper airport manager, was always surveying his domain, even when flying a Citation for a local construction company. A decorated naval aviator who had commanded a Martin PBM flying boat in the Pacific, he returned to his hometown, Watsonville, after the war to run the airport. I worked for him in the late 1970s and was fascinated by his stories, the telling of which could distract him from chewing me out for my latest screw-up. Like the time I didn’t set the fuel truck’s parking brake, then climbed out and watched it roll into a fence.

“What happened to my fence?!”

“Ummm … hey, Mr. Ackerman, when were you stationed at Pensacola?”

Storytime. Crisis defused.

Today, Vern is 101 and kept alive, I’m guessing, by decades of cigars, leaded avgas fumes, and QB martinis (Beefeater gin, a suggestion of vermouth, a dash of Jet-A, and two olives. Stirred, not shaken).

The Watsonville fly-in might’ve had official sponsors, but it was Vern’s show at his airport. Most operations utilized the pavement, including the pictured PT-19. PT means Primary Trainer, but it’s not your grandmother’s Stearman PT-13 or 17 biplanes (NS or N2S in Navy livery). Although, as a WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) during World War II, she probably trained in and ferried Stearmans and Fairchilds before upgrading to Mustangs and Liberators. WASPs set the cool factor bar extremely high. I’ve never been cool and proved that as I lingered around the Fairchild, taking pictures, and looking pathetic, until the pilot offered a ride. It was his only way to get rid of me.

Nothing in aviation beats open-cockpit flying. It’s “motorcycling in the sky,” a cheesy phrase I’ve overused without shame, but before discovering the metaphor, I had to find my seat in the Fairchild. Not as easy as it sounds. Many tandem open-cockpit airplanes assign the PIC to the back, where it’s challenging to see around a quarter-mile of upsloping nose. The PT-19 puts the PIC in front, behind the firewall, where your feet stay warm in summer with heat from the inverted, six-cylinder Ranger. Introduced in 1939, the PT-19’s engine produced 175-HP. The A and B models upped that to 200-HP, with the PT-19B serving as an instrument trainer by enshrouding the student beneath a collapsible hood for maximum vertigo. Swapping the Ranger for a 220-HP Continental radial makes the PT-19 a PT-23 and arguably less attractive but still worth a roll in the haze.

It’s easy to spot the real pilot in the photo; he’s sporting goggles and a 1970s Richard Bach mustache. Later while in the rear cockpit, I imagined spectators assumed I was PIC, so I stretched exaggerated glances around the nose as we taxied. I alone bought the Walter Mitty fantasy, but flying classics suspends reality and demands acceptance of flight as Nature intended with romance the mission and transportation a byproduct. That day, we traveled nowhere, but unrestrained by cabin walls, my mind was transported everywhere and refuses to return.

Yeah, I’m nuts but no secret there. Now, as I write this on a winter afternoon with sunlight refracting pink crystals in the snow, I’m embarrassed by such cheap imagery, but thankful for cabin heat in my Citabria. Open-cockpit flying might open minds, but unless you’re togged in Nanookwear™, you’ll freeze your tailskid in Midwest winter. Engine heat radiating through the rudder pedals to blister your sneakers in summer, vanishes with low OATs. In that respect it’s much like motorcycling—only in the sky.

The anonymous Fairchild occupants remain frozen in the photo I took 46 years ago. There’s no visible N-number, so it’s tough to google any identities, but here’s a longshot. If you recognize yourself, please contact me so I can put names to faces. More important, your kind gesture, the open-cockpit ride, changed my life. I skipped graduate school and became a fully certificated airport bum. So, thank you.