marine air wrote:
The duo consisted of Charles H. "Chub" Smith and Harold "Bubba" Beal. They used to do an aerobatic routine together in the Bearcats around the Tennesse area. At the time, Harold was the publisher and president of the family business.They owned the newspaper "The Knoxville News Sentinel." His family also had old money from the timber and coal industry in east Tennessee. He was one of the wealthiest people in Knoxville.
The story at the time was that Bubba had all the charm, wit, flying ability, good looks, airplanes, and of course, fortune. He allowed his underling , Chub to walk in his shadow and study his greatness and natural ability at flying and everything else.
He had a Stearman, T-28A,p-51, Learjet, F7F Tigercat, F-86, Me-109/Buchon, three Bearcats, and I don't remember what else. After Chub got killed by a lightning strike on a cross country flight to his home in Palm Beach, all the airplanes went for sale within a couple of years.
The Stearman was lost when it's one mag went bad while Bubba was flying over the Tennessee River across from the Univ. of Tenn. He put it down on a rock bluff about the size of a trailer truck. It's visible from the campus. The airplane was a write off however Bubba's ego and status as a legend remained unblemished.
The T-28A was written off after the fuel gage broke and left Bubba over a winding mountain highway with only a couple hundred feet of road to put it down.
I think the F-86A survived their ownership without incident.
The F7f was sold to Kalamazoo and tried to kill John Ellis on its ferry flight to Kalamazoo.
The Me-109/Buchon was only flown by Bubba. He scraped a wingtip landing at Oshkosh and shortly thereafter it got away from him at Reno. Buchons were dirt cheap back then and a lot of people donated them after tearing them up. The prospect of a Messerschmitt with a hot Merlin at Reno was very exciting and talked about by several people back then.
The Lear, a 20 series, was sought after by the IRS and they were going to impound it. It was hidden at KTYS and he got tipped off. SO he jumped in it single pilot and took off. He disappeared a minute or two after takeoff from radar contact and went tree hugging. He landed on someone's private 2000' foot grass strip. He slammed it on, locked the brakes and full thrust reverse and after a huge cloud of dust cleared he had gotten it stopped without hitting anything. He then hid it under some huge trees.
The Feds knew he couldn't be more than twenty miles from the airport but it took two years to find it. When they found it they had to haul it out of there on a flatbed truck.
AWESOME! Thanks. Reading that sort of jogged my memory about Bubba's profession. I forgot about the newspaper business. I guess it was the business that took out loans 'against' the airplanes that caused all the legal hassle back then.
I kind of have to laugh about a Buchon with a 'hot' Merlin. That's like stuffing a 454 into a Vega, isn't it? It kind of defeats the purpose. Bubba's Buchon was only at Reno to participate in the 'dogfight' with Jerry Billings in the Spitfire. He did qualify it (something like 302 mph), but it wasn't fast enough to make the field.
Ironically, that is the same Buchon that the Whittington's entered in 1976. That went up in smoke when they found metal in the screens at Las Vegas on the flight up from Phoenix. Talk about a monstrosity...the thing was painted in pseud-RAF markings. (shaking my head....)
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