Two of Sonoma County’s oldest veterans take holiday flights on WWII aircraft

Veterans Day can be bittersweet for survivors of combat such as Al Maggini, who’s 105, and Del Tiedeman, 100. But this Veterans Day was historically sweet.

Santa Rosa resident Maggini and Healdsburg’s Tiedeman, almost certainly Sonoma County’s oldest and second-oldest vets, were treated Wednesday to flights in a most unusual airplane. The 1942 variation of the hardy Douglas DC-3 airliner saw action in World War II and then was pressed into service against communism in Southeast Asia.

The dual-engine propeller plane’s owners, Joe Anderson and Mary Dewane of the Russian River’s Benovia Winery, had sought for some time to take WWII aviators Tiedeman and Maggini for flights. But the coronavirus pandemic thwarted earlier attempts.

On Veterans Day, the stars aligned. To help assure the two centenarians would be safe, Anderson and Dewane decided to take them aloft separately.

Taking off at midmorning from the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, Spirit of Benovia pilot Jeff Coffman and co-pilot Paul Bazeley took Tiedeman up first, then returned for a second flight with Maggini.

On both flights, the restored and modernized DC-3 flew south along Highway 101 and the Petaluma River. At an altitude of no more than about 1,000 feet, the classic transport aircraft crossed San Pablo and San Francisco bays and rumbled above Treasure Island, the San Francisco skyline and the center span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Then it turned at sea, flew again over the bridge and headed for home.

The flight was especially meaningful to Tiedeman.

As a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot, he flew the variation of the DC-3 called the C-47 Skytrain. He dropped paratroopers on D-Day and then towed gliders, evacuated wounded and flew other missions throughout the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Holland and the slog toward Hitler’s Germany.

At a soaring moment in Wednesday’s first flight, pilot Coffman arose from his seat alongside co-pilot Bazeley and invited Tiedeman to take the controls. The widowed and long-retired business executive had not flown such an aircraft since the war.

Tiedeman dropped into the pilot’s seat, placed his hands on the yoke and his feet on the pedals. Bazeley yielded him control of the aircraft.

“He jumped right in,” pilot Coffman said. “He made a couple of turns, 360-degree turns, like he’d been doing it all his life.”

Minutes after the Spirit of Benovia landed back at the county airport between Santa Rosa and Windsor, Tiedeman stepped gingerly off it, aglow.

“It was delightful,” he beamed before several TV crews on the tarmac. “This is a jewel, this airplane is.”

Slender, elegant and grateful, Tiedeman, who’d witnessed his share of death and horror in the war, shared that he got a bit emotional while in the air.

“I was choking up with joy,” he said. “This is the most astounding Veterans Day.”

With the completion of his flight, it was Maggini’s turn.

The retired stockbroker and prominent Sonoma County philanthropist and civic leader had flown on DC-3s, but not in the military. Through much of the 1930s, most commercial air travel in the U.S. was aboard that aircraft and its smaller sister, the DC-2.

In World War II, Maggini served, like Tiedeman, as an officer in the Army Air Corps. He wasn’t a pilot but a navigator. He flew 35 bombing missions over Germany in the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.

Maggini took in his Veterans Day aerial tour of the bay in the jump seat directly behind pilot Coffman and the cockpit. For him, it was the perfect vantage point.

“It was fun watching the instruments,” Maggini said. “It was something different, entirely different from the normal day. And that’s good.”

Both he and Tiedeman heaped thanks on the hosts of the extraordinary Veterans Day flights, Anderson and Dewane.

Anderson, who founded Benovia Winery with his wife in 2003 and bought the airplane in 2008, teared up a bit thanking the vets for their service to the country and for coming along on Wednesday. Anderson shared that his gratitude to military veterans is rooted in the appreciation he’s felt all his life for his father and two uncles who served and sacrificed in combat in World War II.

Visibly honored to have Tiedeman and Maggini aboard the DC-3, Anderson said, “I’m the luckiest man in the world to be able to share this airplane with these men.”

Before former pilot Tiedeman headed back to his apartment at a Healdsburg senior care community, he pondered whether he’d ever expected to be back in the air and at the controls of the model of winged workhorse he last piloted 75 years ago.

“It would have been just a dream; that’s all,” he said. “Just a dream.”

And yet there he’d been, banking one of the prettiest DC-3s anywhere in a clean 360 above the North Bay and wide, wide awake.

You can contact Chris Smith at 707 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.