Any of you who are familiar with the history of Edwards Air Force Base or who read The Right Stuff or saw the movie are familiar with Pancho Barnes and her Happy Bottom Riding Club.

Pancho Barnes was a very interesting and accomplished woman.  I just started my second reading her biography by Lauren Kessler titled The Happy Bottom Riding Club.  I read it years ago and was looking for something to read as I just finished re-reading Alas Babylon.

I have always been an avid reader and in these days of staying home I have more time to read,  I read a chapter or two of whatever I am currently reading at lunch and if no good old movies are on television I'll read another chapter or two.

I highly recommend The Happy Bottom Riding Club.  It's very entertaining and filled with little known historical facts.  For instance, when John Wayne was in college he used to hang out at Barnes' mansion in Los Angeles along with a lot of other people.  She didn't think much of him.

Funny thing.  I have lost interest in the present and spend my time looking for reminders of the past.  I have no interest in new books or movies.  I have a collection of about 100 books on my Nook and I would rather re-read something I've read before and would rather watch old movies on TCM than anything on today's television fare.  

Noel

 

There's a great 64 minute documentary about her on Amazon Prime (free for members). Well worth watching. Pancho's (that's the locals name for what was otherwise known as The Happy Bottom Riding Club  😄) was a  Southern California legend in it's own time back in the late 1940's-early 1950's. Lots of good info here  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Bottom_Riding_Club ..........Doug

Thanks Doug, I'll check it out.  Pancho's life virtually ended when her place burned down.  She was in the middle of court battle to save it from the Air Force who wanted the property to extend one of Edward's runways.  Mysteriously the place burned down and the Air Force got their land.

Noel

 

You should also check out Chuck Yeager's autobiography - Yeager  - it contains a lot of stuff about Pancho Barnes, and he doesn't pull any punches about saying what she was like, i.e. rough as hell and not exactly very photogenic, which is why she is probably not too well known even though she was a very much better pilot than Amelia Earhart. I think the remains of Pancho's bar are still out there in the desert.

Edited August 12, 20205 yr by Chock

@birdguy and @W2DR

Believe it or not I’ve actually been to what is left of The Happy Bottom Riding Club back in ‘89 or ‘90.

I was living in Victorville from ‘87-‘90 and finishing up my last three years of high school. I was already interested in aviation, mainly military and test flight, as well as doing my PPL training and flying at KAPV and was in the Civil Air Patrol based at George AFB.

For anyone interested in aviation, especially military, the high desert was a great place to be at the time with George AFB flying Phantoms all day and Edwards only an hour or so drive away.

I used to go out to Edwards any chance I got, be it for an air show, open house, shuttle landing or CAP event/training. I’d already read a lot of books about Chuck Yeager, Edwards history and such and was just drawn to the base due to its history.

So I found out that they had a NASA tour as well that I didn’t know about and ended up going on it. Back then security on the base was a bit more lax and than these days. I showed up at the visitors gate, told them I was going on the NASA tour, got a pass and directions and that was about it.

My step brother and I went on the NASA tour, which in its own right was pretty cool. After the tour I suggested we try to find Panchos old place and check it out.

I knew the general vicinity of it but not the exact place. We drove around for a while but couldn’t find anything. We stopped at the shoot range on the west side of the base and I asked one of the personnel if they knew where it was. Surprisingly the guy knew and gave me directions without asking who we were or if we had any credentials or authorization.

We were actually not far from Panchos and found the place with no issues. There was a barbed wire fence surrounding the perimeter and a gate blocking the entrance. We were able to breach the perimeter with no issue and walk up to the ruins.

To my surprise there was not as much left to the place as I’d imagined there would be. The main chimney was still up, there was a dried out swimming pool, some walls still standing and some remnants of the concrete foundation and some other stone erection. There were also a couple old burnt/rusted out cars parked near the building which looked to be from the 40’s-50’s era models.

We walked around the place and checked it all out. I just kept imagining what it must have been like back in the day with Yeager and all the other famous test pilots that used to go and hang out there, tell stories about their flying adventures and the planes they were testing. The celebration that went on after Yeager broke the sound barrier, etc. If only walls could tell stories!!! It was really cool to see such an iconic location in person.

Of course I couldn’t leave without a few mementos of the place. I was able to get a tile of the floor by the fireplace, a loose brick/stone from the fireplace, and a few other odds and ends from around the place. My only regret is that I didn’t take a camera with me and that was way before the smart phone era which would have afforded me some good video and photo coverage of what I saw.

To this day I still have all the relics from Panchos labeled and sealed up in ziplock bags. I keep thinking about doing something with them, such as framing them or mounting them in a way to display them better.

After doing some research a few years ago it looks like they used to have an annual BBQ out there at Panchos but hadn’t seen anything posted about in recently, so I don’t know if they still do anything out there or not.

I found so video footage on YouTube of someone who went out there and filmed what was left.

 

 

 

@Chock

Agree, Yeagers book titled Yeager is great as is his other book Press On.

I've read Yeager more than once and have some personal recollections of his and Leo Janus writings.

I vividly remember the Turkestan incident.  My vice wing commander, Col Broughton, ordered the unauthorized mission.  I remember our Thuds returning from the north and instead of returning to their revetments two of the Thuds continued taxiing to the takeoff end of the runway.  A fuel truck and an armament truck went out to meet them.  A KC-135 taxied out to the end of the runway and took off.  The two Thuds had their M-61 Gatling guns reloaded and the aircraft were refueled and took off.

When they returned Broughton ordered the guns removed and they were sent to the salvage yard and cut up with torches.  The gun camera film was later destroyed.

The to pilots were held for court martial and Col Broughton stepped in and said he had ordered the mission.

Broughton was returned to the States for court martial.  General Yeager was the president of the court.  They ended up fining Broughton 35 dollars for destroying the gun camera film and he was allowed to retire.  He wrote two excellent books about the Thud missions to Hanoi...Going Downtown and Thud Ridge. 

One incident in the book I have a semi-personal connection with.  When Yeager was stationed at Holloman Air Force Base the wing commander was General Branch.  They got a New Mexico fish and game truck loaded onto a C-130 and flew to Edwards.  From there they took the truck to a High Sierra lake and loded it with Golden Trout.  They returned and released the trout into a lake where General Branch had his retirement home.  Unfortunately General branch was killed in an air mishap before he retired.

I wrote to General Yeager through his publisher.  I identified myself as a retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant who had retired in New Mexico and that I was an avid fly fisherman and I asked him for the location of the lake.  I got a short answer back.  On the backside of my letter was one word.  Chama.  There are several lakes in the Chama region and never found out which one it was,

That letter is one of two letters in my keepsake box. 

Noel

Thud Ridge is another very good read btw if anyone's never read it. Broughton is quite scathing about stuff on occasion, notably the hydraulic system on the F-105.

9 hours ago, Chock said:

Thud Ridge is another very good read btw if anyone's never read it. Broughton is quite scathing about stuff on occasion, notably the hydraulic system on the F-105.

I saw a documentary on the Smithsonian channel a few months ago called Air Warriors and one of the episodes was on the F-105. All the pilots that were interviewed talked about the weird behaviors of that plane and how many planes were lost in training, in addition to the hydraulic issues.

What Broughton said in his book Thud Ridge, was that if the F-105 took hits, it would cause leaks in the hydraulics which were badly exposed to even minimal damage, and since the design had no effective means of sealing a leak, eventually the thing would become uncontrollable. He suggested it should have some kind of basic backup pushrod manual reversion and shut off valves on the hydraulic lines at various points to prevent all the hydraulic fluid going overboard quickly, so that it might remain controllable at least long enough to allow it to climb and turn for home, so it could at least make it to a safe bailout area.

The large amount of SAMS on that route into North Vietnam, which the Thuds took, frequently forced the aircraft to drop down to break radar locks from the guidance radars, and this would put them in range of Triple A and even small arms fire, where even a small hit would potentially be catastrophic owing to the very exposed and unprotected hydraulics.

These days, aeroplanes do have either that, or at least they seal off a leak. It was the DC-10 accident of American Airlines Flight 191 which was one of the incidents that really highlighted this issue: The port engine pylon of 191 had been damaged during maintenance, leading to an engine separation on take off from Chicago O'Hare. When the engine broke free, the thrust flipped it up and over the wing before it broke away and this smashed through the leading edge slats, causing a big hydraulic leak. With no hydraulic pressure on that side, the leading edge slat retracted whilst the slats on the starboard wing remained extended, creating a massive lift imbalance, and it was game over.

Nowadays such systems have valves which seal these systems to prevent that kind of thing and it's fair to say that had the F-105 had similar protections, many more Thud pilots would, if not able to save their aeroplanes, then at least been able to prolong their time in the air until they were back over the Thai border where the pilot might have then ejected in friendly territory.

Edited August 14, 20205 yr by Chock

I was an USAF electronic warfare tech working on Thuds at George AFB from 74 to 77. Almost all of our aircraft (Wild Weasles) had served in the war, based out of Thailand. Though the model had some quirks, (especially the earlier B models), most of the pilots who flew them in combat had great respect for the aircraft. They were a much easier aircraft to maintain than the F-4. I’m a member of a Facebook group dedicated to the F-105, several surviving pilots and EWOs who flew them in Viet Nam are members.

My Dad was a pilot based in Southern California after WWII, and he visited the Happy Bottom Riding Club several times during its heyday. Apparently Pancho was every bit the character she is portrayed as being in various stories. He told of one occasion when General Jimmy Doolittle showed up. Pancho yelled at him as he came in the door, “Jimmy! You bald-headed son of a b****! Come over here and give me a kiss!”

Chock, the F-105 was performing a mission it was not designed for.  It was designed as a supersonic nuclear weapon delivery system.  Like the B-57, it had a rotating bomb bay which was supposed to carry a nuclear weapon most likely for a LABS delivery.

The internal bomb bay on all the Thuds I worked on carried a 350 gallon fuel tank.

Noel

6 minutes ago, birdguy said:

the F-105 was performing a mission it was not designed for. 

Yup, I know that. Lots of aeroplanes used in Vietnam by the USAF, Army and VNAF were pushed into roles they were not ideally suited for.

It was not helped by the fact that it was essentially a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States, which meant it had a disproportionately high number of air defences for such a small and poor country defending its Northern capital and port.

Couple this with many silly self-imposed rules the US forces had put on them, which basically meant they had to fight with one hand tied behind their back - for example, the preposterous rule that pilots had to gain visual confirmation of an air target before being allowed to fire BVR Sparrow missiles, as if they did not know that blip on their screen was a MiG - and it was a recipe for massive air losses.

2 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

I was an USAF electronic warfare tech working on Thuds at George AFB from 74 to 77. Almost all of our aircraft (Wild Weasles) had served in the war, based out of Thailand. Though the model had some quirks, (especially the earlier B models), most of the pilots who flew them in combat had great respect for the aircraft. They were a much easier aircraft to maintain than the F-4. I’m a member of a Facebook group dedicated to the F-105, several surviving pilots and EWOs who flew them in Viet Nam are members.

My Dad was a pilot based in Southern California after WWII, and he visited the Happy Bottom Riding Club several times during its heyday. Apparently Pancho was every bit the character she is portrayed as being in various stories. He told of one occasion when General Jimmy Doolittle showed up. Pancho yelled at him as he came in the door, “Jimmy! You bald-headed son of a b****! Come over here and give me a kiss!”

That’s pretty cool that your dad got to go to Panchos a few times. 

I can only imagine what George AFB and the Victorville area must have been like back in the 70’s. I didn’t move to Victorville until ‘87 and even in those days I considered it a pretty desolate place, so it must have been pretty sparse back in the 70’s.

It was kind of sad to see George get closed and essentially turned into a bone yard. My CAP squadron was based at George and my flight instructor at Apple Valley was renting a room from an F-4 pilot and his wife. Through her efforts she was able to get me a few hours in the F-4 sim on the base which I’d never gotten had it not been for her

9 hours ago, Chock said:

Couple this with many silly self-imposed rules the US forces had put on them, which basically meant they had to fight with one hand tied behind their back - for example, the preposterous rule that pilots had to gain visual confirmation of an air target before being allowed to fire BVR Sparrow missiles, as if they did not know that blip on their screen was a MiG - and it was a recipe for massive air losses.

I think every book written about the air war in Vietnam points that out.  Add that so many areas that held SAM sites and Airfields that launched MIGs were off limits.

We had one wild weasel crew that was fired on by a SAM site that was in an off limits area.  He returned fire with AGM-45 missiles and destroyed the site.  The next day Washington wanted the crew grounded and punished.  But the crew was already airborne and they got shot down that day.

I doubt you will find anyone who was involved in the air war over the north has anything kind to say about a president who personally selected targets and said, "They can't bomb an outhouse without my sayso.".

Here I am 50 years later still getting riled up when I talk about it.

The one bright spot I remember was when we go permission t bomb the Paul Doumier bridge in Hanoi.

Our morning missions were cancelled.  The birds were already loaded with the usual load.  A 750 gallon fuel tank under each wing and 6 750 pound bombs on the centerline MER.

My crews broke all the safety rules and downloaded the MERs with bombs attached and wing tanks without de-fueling them and setting them in back of the revetment.  Then loading a 2,000 pound under each wing an a centerline fuel tank.

My crews had 4 hours to completely reconfigure the loads and they got the job done.   

Noel 

On 8/14/2020 at 2:28 PM, birdguy said:

...The next day Washington wanted the crew grounded and punished.  But the crew was already airborne and they got shot down that day....

I would have liked to think that a message was sent back to Washington with the question "Punishment enough??" 

Not just you, Noel, but thank you to anyone sharing stories of their experiences.