Sport: Old Hands

The 23 planes were mostly stripped-down ex-Army pursuits—wax-covered P-38s, fat-bellied P-51 Mustangs, and a Kingcobra with two feet chopped off each wing. They roared down the runway at the Van Nuys airfield, zoomed above the Hollywood hills.

Paul Mantz, 43-year-old movie stunt flyer, who had entered the Bendix Trophy Race four times before but never won, had this race figured: it would be won by an old hand, not by some war-bred whippersnapper.

Mantz was an old hand, but he was the only one to have take-off trouble: for five costly minutes after he was airborne, the landing gear of his red-&-white P-51 failed to retract, until he went into a sharp loop.

Many of the younger pilots needed accurate navigation to get anywhere above the overcast, but Mantz flew along at 30,000 feet, using instruments, but to hear him tell it, following his nose. The first time he saw ground was at Pueblo, Colo. “I spotted it through a break in the clouds just off to the right where I wanted to be.” He sat back, gazing at the steamy floor of cloud just below him. “I was sloppy . . . sometimes I’d let the plane climb as much as 1,000 feet without doing anything about it,” said he. “I was figuring out some trick shots for a movie I’m going to make.”

At South Bend, Mantz began to let down for his approach to the field at Cleveland. His nose (and a compass he hadn’t bothered to have accurately calibrated) brought him in over the finish line first. His speed: 435.6 m.p.h., which was 153 m.p.h. faster than Frank Fuller’s 1939 record, the last time the race was held. In second place: Old Hand Jacqueline Cochran Odlurn, Bendix champ in 1938, also flying a P-51.