Bob Hoover Passed Away

I just heard that Bob Hoover has passed away at 94. RIP to one of the great ones. Thank you for some wonderful memories. Now go teach the angles how to really fly.

 

That's sad to hear. Bob Hoover was a really nice person as well as a great pilot. I was in quite a few air shows in which he also participated and we always had fun stuff with him. I just read in the paper that "Pete' Plunket passed away. I worked with her on the SST proposal. She is the engineer who specialized in aero-elasticity and figured out what happened on the Lockeed Electra wing failure. Two of my supervisors and Joe Sutter have passed and the list grows.

 

He was the greatest airshow pilot who ever lived, in my opinion.

A couple of classic videos of Bob:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7R7jZmliGc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_mRy9g3c5w

I remember being at the Reno Air Races in the 1980s. Bob would start the race and pull up in his yellow P-51. If you looked up while the race was going on, he was way up there looping and rolling and flying around, just for the fun of it!

 

I'm glad I got to see him fly his routine.

 

One of the best...

 

Saw him in the 60s in LA area with my father, a WW-II P-47D pilot, who knew him. Great show pilot. Both gone now.

 

A true legend. He is the reason why love I commander's.

 

I saw him do his airshow routine, in both the P-51 and the Commanders, a number of times, and I never got tired of seeing it. Remember that in his younger days, he was a renowned test pilot. And now he's gone to join his fellow test pilots in the heavens. R.I.P., Bob!

 

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Saw his Shrike performance several times.Shook his hand.

 

When I went to my one and only Oshkosh fly-in in 1983, I was coming up from Fond du Lac on a Trailways Bus, and through the windshield I could see, up ahead, a P-51 doing aerobatics. As soon as I could tell that it was a yellow airplane, I knew who it was!

A class individual in every respect. I don't think they make them like that anymore.

 

I believe that it was the late 50's when I first saw Hoover at the Paine Field air show. He did a roll on take off in an F-86. I cannot think of anyone else with the skill and nerve to do that.

 

I read his obituary in the NYT this morning but the on-line copy
has more photos and a couple videos. Amazing lifetime!

--Carter

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/bob-hoover-dead.html?_r=0

 

I, like Bob, as a teenager saw Hoover fly a F-86H at an air show at Barstow, Fl. in the late '50s. First time I had ever seen a plane engulfed in a cloud due to speed and weather conditions. His low level jet flying skills were awesome. I saw him fly many times but the last time was at a Pt. Mugu in the Shrike Commander.

That show not only had Hoover but the Blue Angles flying F-4s and a fly by of a SR-71. Also, there was a Clown act similar to one described many times by Bob (Parks not Hoover) in a Super Cub. Was that you Bob?

 

Not me with a Cub in the act. Our act used an Aeronca Champ... but not a whole one.
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Sad..saw him in Reno many times and met him once still remember when they wouldn't certify him for his medical and he fought back...and along with Art Scholl were true masters of the air...RIP

 

What we need is a new batch of "Let Bob Fly" posters, or better stickers.

--Carter

from the Times obit:

Mr. Hoover flew well into his 80s, but not before clashing with the authorities when he was 72, in 1994, when medical examiners from the Federal Aviation Administration declared him unfit to fly, saying that his “cognitive abilities” had diminished.

Mr. Hoover quickly recertified himself in Australia and began a legal battle back home, led by the defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who had befriended Mr. Hoover through a mutual love for flying helicopters.

Mr. Hoover emerged victorious 18 months later, and his United States license was restored. His campaign found support among fans who wrote thousands of letters. At the Oshkosh Fly-In and Air Show in Wisconsin, posters were displayed everywhere saying, “Let Bob Fly.”

 

I just remembered a story that Hoover told us at one of the Abottsford shows. He stopped somewhere in the middle west to have the oxy system recharged in his airplane. The ramp guy tried to refill the system with a high pressure cart. Bob's airplane had a low pressure system in it and the tail was blown off. he borrowed another P-51 to finish his flight to Abottsford and had engine problems somewhere over mid Canada and landed on a small two lane road in the middle of farm country. He wanted to get the airplane off the road so he let it roll backwards onto a side road. He got chewed out by a little lady who had to maneuver around the P-51 to get by and told him that there was an airport in the next town that he should have used. He eventually got a citation from the sheriff for "Improper parking". Not to diminish anything about Hoover but the first engine out dead stick performance was sprung on scene by Chuck Lyford in a P-38 at Abottsford in 1968, I believe, and Lyford told Bob that he should do it in the Shrike and the next year Hoover included it in his show routines. I'll never forget the sight AND sound of the P-38 coming in from a long power off dive and then going into a loop, a roll, and banking off to the east to restart both engines. Hoover said that he practiced in the Shrike for several months in the Mojave , making sure that he got the routine down before doing it in the airshows.

 

+1


I saw Hoover perform multiple times in the '80s at the Reading, PA airshow. I was only a kid at the time but I remember his performances very well. He was flying a twin-engined plane of generous proportions (the Commander?) and he made that plane do incredible things that it looked like it shouldn't have been able to do. Unfortunately, I don't think I got to see him fly a P-51.

 

Saw him do his routines in both the P51 and Shrike..

Bob just had the "feel" right, he was a master of energy management and he did it all so smoothly...

One of the greatest of all time

 

This sentence from one of the articles posted blew my mind.

"In his 94 years, Hoover met Orville Wright, Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, Jimmy Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, Jacqueline Cochran, and Neil Armstrong, spanning the golden age of flight."

 

Damn!


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Was just at the NAS PAX Air Expo yesterday and all performers paid tribute somehow (words or maneuvers) to Hoover. Lots of old soldiers with stories gathered groups to tell of airshows past and Warbird Radio (of course) detailed a lot of his exploits.

 

A photo of Bob's P51 circa 1984.
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Anyone know where it is now?