By Stephen Chapis
At Oshkosh 2023, the two of the biggest highlights of the show were the appearance of Warren’s Piectch’s P-51C Bendix racer Thunderbird (USAAF #43-6859, N5528N) and the Dakota Air Museum’s combat veteran Republic P-47D USAAF #42-27609 (NX4747D) Bonnie. Showing off the aircraft that week was Bernie Vasquez, a consummate warbird pilot whose logbook is filled with the most epic warbird and classic aircraft in the world. Like so many pilots, Berine’s story started at the local airport.
Bernie related, “When I was a kid, my mom was a single mom and we had Nut Tree Airport (VCB), which was in Vacaville, California. They had a very unique little deal where they had a ramp that the pilot could fly into, and then they had a restaurant and toy store and a bookstore, which was aviation-based. So, my mom would take me out there, and I’d just watch the airplanes….My nephew and I…my parents had me very late in life, so my nephew and I were the same age…rode our bikes out there in the summer and we would go down this path and there was the whole airport. We rode around, met a couple people, including a guy named Eugene Thormbrew, who’s no longer with us, and he had a little Piper Tri-Pacer, and I worked out a deal with him. He said, ‘If you come wash my airplane, I’ll give you a ride, but I got to meet with your parents first.'”
“So, I went home and told my mom and bless her heart, she didn’t do what most mothers would do and say absolutely not. No. We got in the car, drove over to his house, met his wife, sat down, had a soda with him, and my mom and him talked. The next weekend I went out to the airport, washed his airplane and he gave me a ride. We flew over to another airport to get gas and I’ve been hooked ever since.” Bernie immediately saw the freedom that flying offers, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to fly for a living. Then he met the next significant person to affect his flying career.
Bernie rode his bike to the airport one day and introduced himself to Steve Seghetti. This normally might not have gotten him anywhere, but Seghetti knew Bernie’s father, Bernie, Sr., so the young and impressionable Bernie, Jr. was invited into the hangar. Inside that hangar was his warbird future. “…there was P-51 sitting there, which is now Blondie/SPARKY [Author’s note- P-51D USAAF #44-72777 (N151D)]. Steve was just the nicest guy in the world. He didn’t know me from Adam, but let me in his hangar, got me up on the airplane, let me sit in it. I didn’t know anything about P-51s…when I walked in and saw that big four-bladed propeller and I thought, ‘Wow, this is cool. I want to fly one of these someday.’ About 13 years later, I soloed that very P-51 at Reno.” Bernie recalled.
Before that day of days would come, Bernie started on the first wrung of the ladder. “I was at the airport every time I could get out there. Anytime I was out of school for spring break or Thanksgiving or Christmas, all I wanted to do was go to the airport. One day, when I was 13, I ran into a guy named Jerry Anderson and he gave me a business card for the local glider port. He said, ‘Hey, they’re always looking for kids to run the line, wash the airplanes and that kind of stuff.’ It was like eight miles from my house, but I rode my bike out there and got the job. I never took a paycheck. I traded everything for hours in gliders,” Bernie said. The school ended up moving to another airport, but Bernie still hung out there because he knew he wanted to do something with airplanes.
Several years went by and Bernie’s perseverance at the airport paid off. When he was a freshman in high school, his English teacher gave the class an assignment to write a report about a news article. He picked up the newspaper and almost immediately found an article. Bernie continued, “…it was about Rex Mays getting the local RFP for the FBO. So, I went home and called him. I said, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you remember me, but I worked for your brother, and you paid me one time to clean the inside belly of your Bonanza that you were rebuilding.’ He remembered me and told me they were just getting started with the building and told me to call him back in a couple months and he was sure he’d have a job for me. The next day though I came home there was a message on our answering machine. It was Rusty, so I called him back. He said, ‘Man, I don’t want you to go get a job at Burger King. Come help us. Just come, start now and help us renovate the building and then we’ll put you to work.” I wasn’t old enough to legally drive a car and I don’t think I was even legal to drive a fuel truck but, I would have to drive it to the edge of the property and then somebody else would have to drive it 150 yards to the gas station.”
“At that time Nut Tree was pretty busy. It was a destination for the old $100 hamburger, and we’d pump a couple thousand gallons a weekend just on that one ramp. So, I did that all the way through high school and again, never took a paycheck. I just traded everything for flying time and that’s how I got my private. I soloed on my 16th birthday, got my license when I was about 19. Then right out of high school, I moved to Vegas with my sister and brother-in-law who lived down there and they were going to teach me how to do tile. I lasted about, I don’t know, maybe three weeks. I went over to Southwest at McCarran to look for a job because, again, I wanted to do something in airplanes. They sent me over Signature Flight Support… and I got hired.”
While working at Signature, Bernie would take a week off in September to go to Reno with the Seghetti family. “I became friends with all the air racers, including the Sanders and the Hinton families. They were there with all their airplanes, and I told Dennis and Steve, ‘Man, I sure do like what you guys do. I would like to do this someday.’ And obviously, growing up in California….Steve Hinton was my idol. But never did I think I would ever be doing any of this,” Bernie recalled. Then one year, Bernie’s dedication to a career in aviation was about to pay off once again. He said, “…Dennis Sanders called me on a Monday morning [after Reno] and said, ‘You know, you say you really like to work on airplanes. I’m looking for somebody.’ And I’m like, ‘Dennis, I don’t have an A&P. I don’t have a toolbox. I don’t even own a screwdriver.’ He said, ‘That’s what’s perfect. I can train you the way I want you to work, not you come here and tell me how you used to do it. So, if you’re willing, I’d really like to give it a try.’ Luckily, Ione was just an hour from Bernie’s home, but he soon bought a Clipped Wing Taylorcraft that cut his 75-minute commute by car to 15-minutes by air, which also allowed him to build time.
Bernie then decided he wanted to go to school, but that didn’t last long because while he’d been working for Sanders, he was helping a friend of his, Sean DeRosier, who was building Giles 202s and One Designs as well as the classic Pitts S-2B, all of which gave Bernie all-new skill sets. “So, I learned how to cover…paint, and work on composites. Then a couple local guys asked me if I would show them how to cover their Christen Eagle. Well, about a month into that, I’d been playing hooky from school, and I was helping them cover the airplane, but I realized one day, I’m not helping them. I’m covering their airplane.” The owners then related that they wanted a number of modifications like semi-symmetrical ailerons and the Delmar Benjamin cowling seen on Sean Tucker’s Challenger 3 biplane. This ultimately led Bernie to open his own shop, White’s Aircraft Restoration, which he ran for 15 years.
His shop brought Bernie into contact with “air show people,” including Warren Pietsch. “Warren is probably the nicest, most patient person on Earth because he’ll have a conversation with anybody and really be genuine about it. Warren was getting Texas Flying Legends going and he’s telling me about it, and it really sounded cool. They had a B-25 that the exhaust had come loose and damaged some cylinders to the point you couldn’t even put over-sized studs in. So, he called me one Sunday and said, ‘Hey, man, we’ve got an air show on Friday. I need to get some cylinders done on this B-25 and I can’t find anybody. Do you think you can do it?’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve never worked on a B-25.’ He replied, ‘But can you, do it?’ I figured an airplane is an airplane, so I threw a bunch of tools together and flew down to Houston.” Bernie spent the next few days working on the B-25 and got the bomber off to its air show on time.
From that point on, Bernie continued working the museum’s aircraft and later started attending airshows. This led to another door opening. Bernie related, “I was sitting in the back of one of them [aircraft] and we all got stuck for weather and everybody had to go back to their real lives. And Warren said, ‘Hey, I got to move that Mustang. Get in it and go.’ From there, I just became director of maintenance for him and slowly got checked out in all the airplanes.”
Before he knew what happened Bernie was a warbird guy. “So, I ended up getting checked out in the Corsair and then the P-40, Wildcat, Hurricane, and the Spitfire. I’m rated in every airplane except the DC-3. I am often asked, especially by young people, ‘What do I have to do to get your job? I’d love to do your job.’ I tell them, ‘Go to the airport and never leave.’ The only reason I’m in the position I’m in now is I sacrificed everything else. This is all I wanted to do. Anytime somebody called to ask what I was doing the next day, I said, ‘I don’t know, what do you have planned?’ If it was something I could work out, I would go do it. So, there’s no half to take to become a warbird guy. It’s just being in the right spot at the right time and having the dedication to do it. When somebody calls, you have to be able to say yes, but unfortunately, most people have real jobs and can’t just drop everything and do head out to the airport. I was very lucky to turn my passion, my hobby into my career.”
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Stephen “Chappie” Chapis's passion for aviation began in 1975 at Easton-Newnam Airport. Growing up building models and reading aviation magazines, he attended Oshkosh '82 and took his first aerobatic ride in 1987. His photography career began in 1990, leading to nearly 140 articles for Warbird Digest and other aviation magazines. His book, "ALLIED JET KILLERS OF WORLD WAR 2," was published in 2017.
Stephen has been an EMT for 23 years and served 21 years in the DC Air National Guard. He credits his success to his wife, Germaine.
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