Giving back to our veterans.
When Pat Patteson sat down in the front right seat of Taigh Ramey’s PV-2D Harpoon World War II aircraft on Friday morning, it was the first time he’d been in that position in nearly 70 years.
“I brought one back home when peace was declared with Japan,” said Patteson, 92. “That was in 1945.”
Ramey, who operates Vintage Aircraft and Stockton Field Aviation Museum at Stockton Metropolitan Airport, invited Patteson, who lives in Danville, Lodi’s Bob Handel and Earl Snyder of Sacramento to take seats in the same type of plane in which they’d flown for the Navy during World War II for a 20-minute flight to Travis Air Force Base. The trio will spend the weekend at “Thunder Over Solano,” the base’s annual open house and air show. Gates open at 9:30 a.m. each day and admission is free.
“This is the first time we’ve had three,” Ramey said. “We’d like to get a whole crew, but that’s hard to do.”
The three veterans waited patiently Friday morning for Ramey and his crew to finish the final maintenance on the plane that hadn’t been in the air since October.
“I figured if it could make it to Wisconsin, it could make it to Fairfield,” Handel joked, referencing the plane’s trip in June to AirVenture Oshkosh.
There were no fears among the three, though, just excitement.
“It’s going to be quite a thrill,” said Patteson, a Navy pilot who did three tours in the Aleutian Islands from 1943-45.
Handel, 89, who trained as a pilot, was a gunner, as was Snyder, 90, who flew reconnaissance missions over the East Coast looking for German submarines.
“We lost an engine one time,” Snyder said. “We were about 100 miles off the coast. I didn’t think we were going to make it back.”
The memories flowed as the three veterans, meeting for the first time, visited in advance of their flight back in time.
“I’ve been in some of these planes, just static and crawling around in them,” said Handel, who mostly flew on B-17s and B-24s and was part of the battle of Okinawa. “Those doggone airplanes have shrunk. It’s harder to get around in one.
“I had to crawl through like a tunnel for about 10 feet to get past the nose wheel to get to the nose of the plane. I didn’t even wear a parachute. You couldn’t. It would get hung up.”
Handel said he had about 17 combat missions and whenever the crew returned, it was served an eighth of an ounce of brandy “to calm your nerves.”
“The thing about it was, the brandy was made in Lodi,” Handel said.