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"Negative, Ghostrider, the pattern is full!"

  

January 31, 2006 - Okay, he didn't get that response from the tower, but Tom Cruise and his beautiful P-51K N51EW were in the pattern at Mojave today doing touch-and-goes. Mojave is often thought of as a place of extreme visual variety, but the sound variety is amazing...the howl of F-4, the scream of White Knight...and on rare occasions like today, the unmistakable purr of a Rolls Royce Merlin.

The P-51K variant was built by North American's Dallas plant, and differed slightly from the 'D' model with the use of an 11' Aeroproducts propeller in place of the usual 11' 2" Hamilton Standard, due to Ham-Standard's inability to keep up with war-time production demand. Performance suffered slightly as a result, and the Aeroproducts' props were prone to severe vibratio problems. Most of the 1337 'K' models went to Great Britain and Australia.
This aircraft, 44-12840, was donated to the CAP in 1946, and twenty years later made its way into the civilian world and the Victory Air Museum in Illinois. After a subsequent string of owners, it was registered as N51EW by Eddie Wachs in the 1990s and given the name Montana Miss, along with corresponding nose art (click here to see a sample on the mustangsmustangs.net website), which has since been removed. The aircraft is currently registered to Valhalla Aviation and is kept at Van Nuys.

I feel like such a paparazzi...
Waving to the FTA 737 crew

Unlike in the movies, no tower fly-bys today...all full-stop taxi-backs. Sigh.