(adapted from B-25 Mitchell in Civil Service)
Much of the Catch-22 information and photos available these days comes from Stoney Stonich who flew copilot on a B-25 during the filming. He runs the North American Trainers Association and his website is right here.
It’s the summer of 1968 and my flying career consists of flight instructing at the Fullerton, California, airport and about a thousand hours of flight time. A friend of mine called to tell me that some B-25s were being readied for a movie at nearby Orange County Airport by Tallmantz Aviation. I immediately went there to see about flying in the movie. I talked to the Chief Pilot, Jim Appleby, and filled out an application. I was told: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” So, I waited for that call...and waited...until one day my friend called to say that he had just been hired as a mechanic for the movie. Apprehension got the better of me, so I returned to Tallmantz and let Appleby know that I was still very interested in flying for them. Two more weeks of waiting and then they called me: report to the hangar on Monday, Dec. 2, 1968.
That Monday morning there were ten of us at the Tallmantz hangar: two airplane commanders and eight copilots. Jim Appleby and VP for Flight Operations Frank Pine were in charge of the week’s activities: ground school and flight training. What a shock going from a Piper Aztec to a pair of 1,700 hp Wright Cyclones with a fifteen-ton airplane attached! After filling out more paperwork for Paramount Studios, we completed our training and stood by for our departure date for Mexico. On New Years Day 1969, I was part of the second flight of B-25s to be flown from Orange County Airport to Guaymas, Mexico. Many of us had not flown formation before and forming up over the Pacific Ocean south of Newport Beach had its share of thrills and excitement. Getting those “ponderous beauties,” as Frank Tallman called them, to stay 100 feet apart for three and a half hours wasn’t easy. From the ground the sight must have seemed hilarious; from the cockpit, hair-raising.
We landed at Paramount’s custom-built airfield. Work crews had constructed a 6,000’ by 200’ runway with a perimeter taxiway and a hardstand for each airplane. Other than being surrounded on three sides by mountains, it was very well built. We always had to land from and takeoff towards the sea and no matter which way the wind blew, we always seemed to have a crosswind. The work crews also had cut down all the organ cactus for a mile around the field to create the Mediterranean setting and built a “base” at the site with a hospital, mess hall, control tower, bomb dump, and enough pyramid tents to house the entire cast and crew. Fortunately, we didn’t have to live in them, though; the local motel was bad enough. The next day we reported out at the “base” for duty. By an act of Paramount, I was commissioned as a First Lieutenant, USAAF. We were issued uniforms and leather flying jackets with the Squadron insignia patch on it: a naked, long-haired lady riding a diving bomb and holding a spear in her right hand. The special effects department did wonders making the airplanes look war weary. Oil and paint were splashed over them and nose art was sanded to make the airplanes look as if they had flown many missions. We did have to change one thing: we had to clean the windows. No one would fly into combat with dirty windows. Most of the airplanes had names: Berlin Express, Dumbo, Denver Dumper, among others; the one I flew the most was Passionate Paulette. Each day we had a pilots’ meeting to be briefed on the flying for the day, including weather conditions and duty for those not assigned flying. Our film formations were flown stacked up in right echelon. Normally we landed out of the right echelon with the leader breaking over the numbers and us spacing about 2,000 feet in trail.
The most dangerous part of the filming were the mass takeoffs. Imagine sixteen airplanes lined up on the runway, all at 30 inches of manifold pressure. At brake release at one-to-two second intervals, each B-25 goes to takeoff power. This scene was used at the beginning of the film. The wake turbulence was unbelievable. We did the shot four times. On the first two I was in the number two ship and the turbulence wasn’t bad. On the third we were number nine and the turbulence was terrible. We found ourselves drifting left towards the next plane to takeoff, and with both of us on the controls we still couldn’t stop the left drift. Then we hit the turbulence going the other way and shot to the right; what a ride! On the fourth takeoff we were number sixteen and we had a runaway propeller right after the gear came up. The prop governor had failed and we had to shut the engine down and feather the prop. After landing we found out a B-25 will not taxi on one engine. You can turn into the dead engine, but with no nose wheel steering, that’s all you can do. Another area that calls for special handling on the B-25 are the touchy brakes.
Flying the B-25 in 1969 was a big thrill for me and it still is even with another 17,000-plus hours behind me. It started my own love of warbirds. Since then I have crewed on a P-51 at the Reno Air Races, owned my SNJ-5 for seventeen years (it has the Catch-22 insignia on it), and flown some heavy iron like the PV-2, DC-3, DC-4, DC-8, DC-10, and Boeing 747 (among others) but there’s a soft spot in my heart for the heaviest (feeling) iron of them all: the B-25.
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