At 91, great-grandfather John Bailey will take off from Luskintyre Airport on Saturday in the same type of plane he first flew 73 years ago.
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Mr Bailey would not miss this weekend’s Great Tiger Moth Air Race for anything.
So when the yellow Tiger Moth 66 gathers speed and lifts off, the iconic aircraft will be deftly handled by a man who knows and loves aircraft.
And like the air enthusiast he is, Mr Bailey will not just be in the race for fun.
He aims to win.
“I was a teenager when the last war started and I signed up with the RAAF right away,” Mr Bailey said .
“At the time I was living in Perth, so the first plane I ever flew was a Tiger Moth.
“Everyone who qualified as a pilot then was being sent to fly bombers in England, but when I qualified, our unit was assigned to fly Wirraways.”
After a training spell on various planes, Mr Bailey started flying Kittyhawks from the southern tip of New Guinea.
He remembers the Japanese Zero as a pretty hard plane to compete against.
So instead of taking them on in the air, his 75 Squadron flyers specialised in bombing their aircraft on the ground.
“But this weekend I will be with the planes I really love – because the Tiger Moth is in a class of its own,” Mr Bailey said.
“I have infected my son Kevin with the love of flying and he and I will be taking part in the big air race in the same plane – both of us doing spells of flying and navigating.”
What does he think of Baron Von Richthoven, the German World War I air ace?
“He appears to have been a very arrogant man,” Mr Bailey said.
“He would have been really annoyed to know that he was finally shot down not by another air ace, but by ordinary Australian ground troops.”
Vantage points for the great race
The Great Tiger Moth Race is on this weekend and starts about 9am with the take-off of 31 historic biplanes from Luskintyre Airport on Saturday.
Those 31 aircraft have extra fuel tanks, so they will fly to Warnervale to join with another seven Tiger Moths that don’t carry additional fuel.
For people in the Maitland area, the ideal place to see the mass flypast will be any area on the southern side of the city.
“Anywhere around southern Maitland will be a good spot,” race director Richard Brougham said. “All the planes will come past together at a rough altitude of 1500ft, so it will be quite spectacular.
“They will be in fairly loose formation then, but will close up into six or seven formations as they approach Nobbys.
“About 9.30am they will fly past Fort Scratchley and the foreshore at Stockton.”
From there, the planes will fly down the coast to Camden Airport and over Sydney Harbour Bridge, before skirting the Central Coast to Belmont Airport and returning to Luskintyre.
Day 2 of the race will involve Tiger Moths flying to Paterson, Dungog, Gloucester and landing at Taree Airport for lunch. They will then fly to Seal Rocks, swinging inland again and finally landing back at Luskintyre.