Bob Hoover

Uh, he hung out with some pretty wild characters.

I mean, as a kid, you know, I had interactions with General Chuck Yeager, with Don "The Snake" Prudhomme, with, uh, you know, all these, you know, uh, Bob Hoover, who's a famous airshow pilot.

I mean, the kind of people he hung out with that were his friends.

Matt Jackson was one of his closest friends, who's a very famous airplane, uh, you know, warbird pilot and, and, uh, race pilot.

I'm Taildragger.

This is the Hangar on Radio Hangar, and the name of that pilot was Bob Hoover.

If you've spent any real time around air shows, you know that name, and you probably just leaned forward a little.

Good.

Powered by a BMW 801 radial engine, it was fast, it was maneuverable, and it was deeply unforgiving of mistakes.

German pilots trained for months on the type before flying it in combat.

It had killed a great number of Allied airmen, including, on one occasion, Bob Hoover himself.

He had never sat in one.

Then they lose their minds.

That was Bob Hoover.

And if you've been in aviation for more than about a week, you already know the name.

But I want to tell you where that man came from, because the airshow legend is only half the story, and the other half starts in a prisoner of war camp in northern Germany in the last winter of the Second World War.

He was repatriated.

He went home.

That escape did something to Bob Hoover that I think defined everything that came after it.

He had been in a cage.

That bothers me, because if you were to ask Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, a man who flew sixty-two combat missions in Korea and tested more than two hundred aircraft types before Gemini and Apollo, if you asked him who the greatest pilot he ever saw was, he would not hesitate.

He would tell you Bob Hoover.

Pull up a chair, because this one deserves your full attention.

Robert Anderson Hoover was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1922.

He tried to escape multiple times.

Every time they caught him, there were consequences.

Isolation, reduced rations, transfers to more secure facilities, but he kept trying, because that is who Bob Hoover was.

He was the kind of man who, when you put him in a cage, spent every waking hour working the problem of how to get out of it.

And, um, I wouldn't be an advocate of that unless you real- like me, you're caught in a situation where you just had to.

Well, as the late Bob Hoover has said, and I'll paraphrase, 'cause I'm not sure anybody exactly has the quote, but he says, "Fly the airplane as far into the crash as you can." And, uh, fortunately, the trees were a little bit lower.

You had a tailwind.

You got it down on the ground, and you have shared some very important knowledge.

Whereas a commercial pilot doing 25 degrees nose up, 10 down, and 60 degrees of bank, they've only seen 12% of the attitude envelope.

But if I can take them up in an appropriate aircraft, an aerobatic aircraft, and, uh, show them how we can be upside down and still pour the tea like Bob Hoover and not spill the coffee, um, they understand that, okay, there's more out there to learn.

There's more to this.

And if I can give them the skills to save their life in an airplane someday, great.