A rare World War II fighter, painted in a purposeful flat olive drab, flew over the Sonoma Valley this week, the engine a dull roar as the plane banked and dove.
?It sounds great ... It?s a beautiful thing to see,? said Jack Wallace, 86, of Petaluma. ?Just to hear it is great.?
Wallace was one of a handful of World War II fighter pilots among the crowd of 75 at the airport Wednesday to see the fighter, a Curtiss P-40.
?It?s an absolute pleasure to fly, I?m pleased,? said Chris Prevost, 46, owner of Sonoma Valley Airport and Vintage Aircraft Co. He estimates he?s spent 10,000 hours over several years restoring the craft.
Prevost?s fighter is one of only two dozen P-40s still flying, out of 13,700 built. It is valued at about $2.5 million.
The Curtiss P-40 is a single-seat, propeller-driven plane first built in 1938 and was hopelessly outperformed by the German and Japanese fighters of the day.
?We found out the only way you could fight a Zero and live is you make one pass at it and then get the hell out of there,? said Ray Melikian, 90, of Visalia, an Army Air Corps pilot with a special relationship with the plane.
When the plane, which was deteriorating in Australia, was sold to Prevost, a historian used the serial number on the plane to trace its history back to Melikian, reuniting the pilot and plane.
?I would take it up as high as I could. That was the way we fought. I dove it from 20,000 feet and tried to pull it out at 5,000 feet.?
The fighter was not fitted with a turbocharger, which hindered the power the engine would produce at high altitudes, so it became a low-level fighter.
?Barges, airports, cover for troops, escorting low-level bombers, things like that ... we went up damn near every day,? Melikian said.
Melikian was on a convoy that stopped overnight in Pearl Harbor three days before the Dec. 7, 1941 attack, so he began flying combat missions almost immediately from Darwin, an Australian city that was heavily bombed by the Japanese.
In two years in the South Pacific, he logged 238 combat missions. He is credited with downing two Zeroes and one Japanese bomber.
The P-40 was a difficult plane to fly, with stiff controls, strong torque from the engine and a narrow track for the landing gear, making takeoffs and landings harrowing, Melikian said.
Still, it was heavy and rugged and became the workhorse for the American, British and Russian air forces, gaining fame as the planes used by the Flying Tigers in China against the Japanese.
?It?s lumpy,? Prevost said of the plane?s skin. ?It is lumpy because it has a lot of structure, it was designed to take a bullet.?
Prevost first saw one as a kid hanging around the Sonoma Valley Airport, in the 1960s, when they were not considered valuable, and fell in love.
This P-40 was damaged in a landing collision in Australia, robbed of parts and left to deteriorate.
When Prevost got it, it was only a shell from the firewall to just behind the fuselage, with little left of the wings, necessitating years of finding parts and making those that he couldn?t find.
?Lots of machining, lots of drilling, lots of rivets,? Prevost said.
Prevost flew the plane for the first time a week ago, a 22-minute shake-down flight to make sure the hydraulics all worked.
Wednesday, he took the plane up for 40 minutes, at times sweeping low over the airport.
Prevost added a second seat in the fighter and plans to sell rides in the plane beginning in March, beginning at $1,595 for a 30-minute flight.
It is also the same plane that Melikian had flown in combat missions, and he is hoping for his own reunion with it.
?I?m 90 years old, I don?t think that he will let me go up there and fly myself,? Melikian said. ?As soon as he gets it certified, he will call me.?
You can reach Staff Writer Bob Norberg at 521-5206 or bob.norberg@pressdemocrat.com.
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