Free Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War by Bruce Henderson Page B

knew they would not relish flying off carriers in all types of weather, and others anticipating a career after the navy in which having multiengine experience could help them land a job as a commercial airline pilot.
    As for Dieter, he wanted only the A-1 Skyraider. With a big engine spinning a huge propeller, it had the deep, throaty sound of the World War II plane that had swooped low over his house in the Black Forest. At Pensacola, he had watched Skyraiders taking off and landing, often with open canopies right out of the goggles-and-scarf era.
    It was not just in Dieter’s imagination that the A-1 seemed like a throw-back. Designed during the last year of World War II, the Skyraider had entered service in 1946 as the optimum carrier-based attack bomber, designed to outperform the enemy’s best propeller-driven fighters while carrying to target a bomb load greater than that of the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress. The Skyraider was the creation of the aircraft designer Ed Heinemann, who during his illustrious career at Douglas Aircraft designed more than twenty combat aircraft for the navy, including many that became legends, such as the SBD Dauntless dive-bomber. Heinemann, a self-taught engineer, described his approach to aircraft design as rather straightforward,explaining that he took the most powerful engine available and built a plane around it. In the Skyraider, Heinemann outdid himself, using the largest radial engine ever put in a single-engine U.S. military aircraft that went into production. The Skyraider had the same 2,700-horsepower Wright R-3350 engine that powered larger multiengine aircraft such as the B-29 Super-fortress, C-119 Flying Boxcar, and DC-7. The A-1’s power and stability allowed it to carry aloft a payload greater than its own weight. After missing the war for which it was designed, the Skyraider saw action in Korea. During that campaign, a squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Prince ton took up the challenge that a Skyraider could “carry everything but the kitchen sink.” Under one wing a kitchen sink was attached to a 1,000-pound bomb, and both were dropped on the enemy near Pyongyang in August 1952.
    There was a trade-off with the A-1: along with its ability to carry great loads for long distances, there was its lack of speed. With a normal cruising speed of 180 miles per hour, the A-1 was a slow mover in the supersonic age, when jets routinely operated at more than twice that speed. In homage to an earlier era, the A-1 was dubbed the “Spad” after a famous biplane of World War I. Being a holdover from another time and place was part of the plane’s charm, contributing to tradition and nostalgia—not only for Dieter but for the other pilots who signed up to fly Spads and the crews who maintained them. A “typically cocky Spad jockey” possessed an abundance of “style and derring-do,” and became accustomed to landing at a new base, shutting down the roaring engine that drove a fourteen-foot propeller and smelled of burning oil, only to have gawkers who saw “sleek jets every day and couldn’t care less” come over and stare at the A-1 asking endless questions. “Hell, everyone drives a Ford,” one Spad pilot remarked, “but how many Model T’s do you see on the road?”
    After turning in their list of aircraft choices, the students were told they would receive their assignments when they reported to Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, located on the Gulf coast of Texas some 700 miles from Pensacola.
    Dieter heard scuttlebutt that the limited Spad assignments were “first come, first served” in Texas, and that one would have a better chance by being early on the scene, before all the available slots were filled. However, no one could leave until their order to proceed to Corpus Christi camethrough, so the opportunities for a head start were not good. Dieter, though, was dating the daughter of the Saufley base commander, and she told him one night that his class would