When you’re a journalist, you never know where you will hear a story, especially one that is thirty years old. A few weeks ago, I was interviewing retired GM Ride & Handling Engineer Jim Mero for an article that will appear in Corvette Magazine. So, you can imagine my surprise when the interview concluded with a story about the 1994 Phoenix Air Races and the demise of the Super Corsair. At the time, Jim was working the Chevrolet Lumina program out at the General Motors Desert Proving Grounds (closed in 2009) in Mesa, Arizona, which was located adjacent to the northeast edge of Mesa Gateway Airport. Naturally, I asked if he took any photos during the race, he said, “I still have the photos, but they are buried in the basement somewhere.” Well, Jim did dig for them, and he did find them, and they are being published here for the first time.
How did we get on the subject? As we were wrapping up our interview, he asked about what other writing I had done, so I gave him a short synopsis of my work at Warbird Digest and its digital arm WarbirdsNews, which of course is today’s Vintage Aviation News. When I mentioned my upcoming book about Baa Baa Black Sheep, Jim said, “Oh wow! I loved that show! Pappy Boyington and the F4U Corsair! Love it! Let me tell you a Corsair story.” My curiosity was immediately peaked, and I wondered what a Ride-and-Handling Engineer who spent his entire career at GM, and the last 15 years testing Corvettes on some of the most iconic racetracks in the entire world, could tell me about the Corsair. When he began with, “Ok, the General Motors Desert Proving Grounds used to be in Mesa, Arizona…”, I knew what the story was about, but I kept quiet. As it turned out, only the Super Corsair’s pilot Kevin Eldridge himself was closer to the crash than Jim and his fellow engineers. What follows is a never-before-published account of the Phoenix Air Races and the crash of the Super Corsair as seen from a most unique viewpoint.
“The Proving Grounds were right next to the airport where they were having these races,” Jim began, “And a couple of the pylons were on the grounds. They brought these cranes out and they put them up and the big red thing on them. The start was also over the proving grounds. When we got ahold of the schedule for the races, we would arrange our lunch around the races. On that Saturday, we all drove out there in the middle of the desert on one of the test roads and pulled over. When they stated the race, they would dive right at us. If they had machine guns, they could have killed us all! They were coming right at us!”
“Later that day, we knew there was one more race, but everybody else had gone home. I told them, ‘I’m going to go back out and watch the final race.’ One other guy went out there with me. I didn’t know shit about airplanes, but I told the guys that one of the airplanes was a Corsair and the only reason I knew that was because of Baa Baa Black Sheep! Those guys really flew low. I got a picture, and my buddy’s standing about 20 or 30 feet from me and the wing of the plane going through the turn is lower than his head.”
Though the Phoenix races had potential, they ultimately failed for a variety of reasons, but they are not germane to this article. For better or worse these air races will always be remembered for the dramatic near-fatal crash of the Race 1 Super Corsair on March 19, 1994. At the time it was perhaps the most terrifying crash of an Unlimited air racer since the RB-51 crash that nearly claimed the life of Steve Hinton in 1979. At the start of lap 4 in Unlimited Heat 2B, Eldridge was running second and rapidly closing in on Howard Pardue’s #66 Sea Fury. Just after they passed pylon 1 though the All-Coast Super Corsair began trailing white smoke. From the stands it looked benign enough, but what spectators didn’t know was that the 4,100-hp 28-cylinder Wasp Major had suffered a master rod failure and had caught fire. As Eldridge climbed for altitude, sporadic flames began to appear, and in seconds the Corsair was trailing 75 feet of flames. Eldridge’s ground crew ordered him to bail out. Eldridge told AOPA in July 1994, “I pulled the power back, but it still kept running rough, so I pulled up and called a Mayday.” As Eldridge began unhooking and disconnecting everything and slid the canopy back, the Corsair was slowing down and the torque of the 4360 had pulled the aircraft into a steep diving turn to the right.
As Eldridge stood up on the seat to bail out, his left foot got stuck in the cockpit. As he recalled with AOPA: “I remember pushing down on the side rails of the cockpit with everything I had and I couldn’t get out. Then, finally, I broke loose and just flopped over the side. The plane was still going over 220 mph, and the air pulled me out.” That last ditch effort to get out caused a compound “tib-fib” fracture. A microsecond later, Eldridge struck the horizontal stabilizer which broke his arm and his neck. In videos of the crash, his parachute deploys almost as soon as he clears the aircraft, but even though he was using a heavy duty parachute, the speed of the deployment blew out two complete panels of his chute and damaged almost half of the other panels.
As the severely injured Eldridge floated down, the Super Corsair, which was barely ten years old, crashed onto the GM proving grounds. Jim spoke of the crash from his point of view, “Well, the race had just started and when the Corsair went by the second or third time, I thought I saw something coming out of it. I asked Fred, ‘Do you something coming out of the back of that plane?’ He’s like, ‘Yes, I do.’ All of a sudden, flames shoot out. He goes vertical… the flames go out, flames come back, flames go out, flames come back and now he’s over the proving grounds. He tried to make a turn to go back to the airport, but I think he realized he wasn’t going to make it. Then he turned back towards the proving grounds and the plane just started going into a dive. I thought to myself, ‘We’re going to watch this guy die.’ Then you see him come out of the plane. We saw his chute open, and the plane crashed in a huge fireball. Anyway, so I get in the car and start towards where the pilot was coming down.”
“By the time I got close though, there was a helicopter already over there. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just go to where the plane went in.’ As I was heading that way, I met a guy who’d been out on the test track. We stopped and I asked, ‘Did you see the crash?’ His eyeballs were huge when he said, ‘I was going through that turn when that f***ing plane went in!’ He just left; he was pretty freaked out because the plane came down like a hundred yards away from him.”
“It was just chaos after that, because the fire trucks were trying to get in. They didn’t know where to go. Then the guards at the gate didn’t have people to direct them out. We’re sending engineers back in to go direct the fire trucks. By the time they got there, the fire was gone. They were just putting out little shrub fires. The crash site was strange. Other than a wheel, all I saw was scattered debris. I couldn’t recognize anything. There was no hole. It was like it had gone in and then the ground filled in behind it. There was a lot of scattered debris around, but that was about it. It just looked like scrap metal. Then someone handed me a video camera, you know those ones that you used to put on your shoulder, and told me to film everything. When I was finished filming, I gave the camera to someone, but I never said the camera or the film again.” While the video of the crash scene may be lost to history, we can be thankful the Jim saved and found the photos for us to enjoy four decades later.
Great article! As a fan of warbirds, air racing and cars this was a neat crossover.
I worked at the DPG at the time, and went to the crash site the following week. I have a bagful of aluminum pieces, most no larger than the size of a quarter.
The desert soil is called caliche; 6″ down it’s hard as concrete. It didn’t surprise me that there was no crater.
The director of the Proving Ground was very, very angry. He was assured of the safety of the event, yet the airplane went down within 25 yards of a track that was in use. Needless to say he didn’t approve of further flyovers, which probably contributed to the demise of the race.