Westmoreland County Airshow wows crowds on second day

Bob Hanko of Westmoreland City sat in a comfortable chair Sunday on the tarmac of the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport near Latrobe, watching fighter planes whiz by at ear-splitting speeds as they performed aerial maneuvers during the Shop ’n Save West­­more­land County Airshow.

“I love to see the planes. I’ve come here the last couple of years,” said Hanko, 74, who was enjoying the event with his family.

It was quite a different aerial show than the ones he saw in the jungles of Vietnam in 1966-67, when he was a 20-something Marine, a few years removed from Norwin High School. He was along the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam and stationed for a time at a little known fire base just south of North Vietnam at a place called Khe Sanh.

Hanko said he was lucky to get out of that base when he did because the North Vietnamese surrounded it in a 77-day siege during the Tet Offensive that began in January 1968.

About 50 yards from where Hanko sat was an Army Black Hawk helicopter — the successor to the Huey helicopters of his day.

“I flew out of one (Huey) when I was wounded,” Hanko said. “It brings back a lot of memories.

“It wasn’t good over there,” he said, “and it was bad when I got home” because of the protests against the war.

World War II represented

If George Herbert Walker Bush were alive, the sight of the World War II-era single engine torpedo bomber parked at the airport might well have elicited bittersweet memories.

Flying an earlier model of the General Motors-built Torpedo Bomber Avenger in an attack on Chichi Jima in September 1944, Bush’s plane was hit by Japanese gunfire. The future 41st president of the United States bailed out of the plane and floated on a raft before being rescued by a U.S. submarine patrolling in the waters off Chichi Jima. His gunner and radio operator/navigator didn’t make it.

The shiny black TBM-3E Avenger on display at the air show was built before the end of the war in 1945, was used in training but never made it into combat, said Pete Ballard, a member of the Commemorative Air Force’s Capital Wing, which owns the plane.

The TBM-3E Avenger is one of only about 30 in existence, and some of those are in various stages of restoration, said Cliff Ellis of Gettysburg, a Capital Wing member.

“It was a very formidable aircraft,” said Ellis, noting it was used in attacks on Japanese fortifications along beaches Marines were to invade. It was assigned to Marine Corps Torpedo/Bomber Squadron.

By walking on the wing of the Avenger, “people can get a sense of what a World War II aircraft was like,” said Ballard, whose Capital Wing group is based in Culpepper, Va. “You can look into the aircraft and see all the gauges” in the cockpit.

Ballard has a connection to the aircraft of World War II. His father was a pilot in B-25 bomber, like the planes used in Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 raid on Japan. He also flew C-47 cargo planes “over the hump” — the Himalayas — from India to supply Chinese forces fighting the Japanese.

Show a success

The air show attracted about 30,000 people inside the airport gates Sunday, despite rainy weather in the morning. It was about the same number as Saturday’s crowd, airport officials said.

“We got a slow start (Sunday), but it worked out well,” said Dwayne Pickels, grant administrator for the airport authority.

More air show fans arrived later in the afternoon, he noted.

“I think the weather did scare off some people both days, but we got in all the acts,” Pickels said.

Holding the air show on the Memorial Day holiday weekend may have affected some people’s plans for attending the show, Pickels said.

An untold number of people gathered in fields and parking lots outside the gates, where they were able to watch the acts but unable to hear the narration of the events.