By Rick Pedone
Staff Writer

On a crisp, cloudless April 9 morning at Kissimmee Gateway Airport, we’ve got the baddest ride on the taxiway.
Perched between a pair of 1,700-hp Wright R-2600 radial engines issuing a throbbing, guttural rumble, pilots Joe Broker and Larry Kelley shepherd the restored B-25J bomber “Panchito” to the holding area next to the runway.

Broker, a retired Delta Airlines captain, works the brakes constantly to keep the polished silver World War II relic pointed in the right direction, but it’s a struggle. The nose keeps yawing left.

“The joke about learning to fly the B-25 is that the hardest part is getting it down the runway,” Kelley said. “It’s got a freewheeling nose gear. A lot of the new pilots got in trouble trying to taxi it. Once you get it in the air, that’s the easy part.”

Golfers at Kissimmee Golf Club, which borders the runway, look up, point and wave as we lumber by.
Panchito is a rare bird, one of only about 20 operating B-25s in the world, Kelley said.

Today, (Saturday) the 67th anniversary of Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s famous raid on Japan, Panchito will join several other B-25s at Columbia, S.C., for a reunion of the surviving Doolittle raiders. Sixteen B-25s took off from the pitching deck of the carrier USS Hornet on April 18, 1942, for the raid that served as the WW II equivalent of 9/11 to the Japanese.

“The physical damage of that raid was inconsequential, but to have American bombers over Tokyo, bombing within a mile of the emperor’s palace, well, that was something that caused the Japanese to alter their entire game plan,” Kelley said. “It forced them to pull their assets back toward Japan, and it set the stage later for the battle at Midway, which we won and turned the course of the war.”
At previous reunions in Columbia, 18 of the Doolittle raiders signed a replica 500-pound bomb that hangs in Panchito’s bomb bay. Four more replica bombs carry the signatures of other WW II veterans who flew B-25s.

“You hear so many stories. A lot of them will stand there and stare at the plane; it brings back memories to them,” Kelley said.

Flying at
2,000 feet
Broker revs the engines to about 3,000 rpm as we hold next to the runway.

It’s a pounding roar that commands the attention of anyone within a half-mile.

Broker gets clearance from the tower and the 1944 B-25J, the last model of the bomber built by North American Aviation, starts to roll.

In just seconds, the nose rotates upward and we’re in the air.

“The takeoff speed on the B-25 is about 110 mph, but you need to be at 135 mph to keep it in the air if an engine goes out. That’s why we get the gear up and level it off right away,” Broker explained later.
We climb to 2,000 feet, turn southwest and fly over Horizon Middle School and Poinciana High School, weaving and banking sharply. This is a Federal Aviation Agency checkout flight for Broker to retain his B-25 certification.

After 15 minutes, we’re approaching the airport for landing.

There is nothing robotic about flying a B-25J. It’s seat-of-the-pants flying, and it’s a two-man job.

“If we lose an engine, you fly the plane. I’ll deal with it,” Kelley tells Broker over the intercom.
Broker works the throttles, adjusts the propeller pitch and works the rudder pedals; Kelley manually pumps pressure into the hydraulic system and lowers the landing gear.

The descent is swift and steep. Broker pulls back on the wheel and the rear landing gear thumps hard on the runway.

“On a short runway sometimes I’ll bring the nose up again,” Kelley tells Broker as the plane rolls to the end of the runway. “You’ve got that huge elevator back there; it’s free brakes.”

Sparse and
cramped

Operating a 63-year-old aircraft like Panchito requires a serious investment of time and funds. Kelley owns the plane and several other warbirds at the Delaware Air Museum in Georgetown, Del. Kelley takes the bomber around the country, where he offers people an opportunity to fly in one of the B-25’s observer seats.

It’s expensive: $350 to $400, for a 30-minute ride.

Kelley said it costs about $1,800 per hour, minimum, to fly Panchito.

The Wright radial engines each have 28 spark plugs. The plugs cost more than $100 each, Kelley said, adding that an engine restoration is $70,000.

Panchito often appears at air shows to benefit the Disabled American Veterans, which funds programs for disabled vets of all services, Kelley said.

What’s it like inside a B-25? Spartan. Patrons clamber up a short ladder into the belly. To reach the glass-enclosed nose, the best seat on the plane, you’ve got to turn onto your back and pull yourself through a narrow tunnel under the cockpit.

“Don’t pull on anything red,” Broker warns passengers. “Yellow is okay.”

This is a plane designed for agile, 19-year-old aviators.

“It looks big from the outside, but there isn’t much room,” Kelley said.

Kelley’s 15-year-old son, Josh, offers assistance to passengers contorting into their seats and he also serves as the primary ground crewman, scrambling up a ladder to the wing to check the fuel level after each landing.

In flight, the B-25 is impossibly, painfully noisy.

“They didn’t use hearing protection during the war,” Kelley said. “When I see someone approach the plane wearing those big tubular hearing aids, I say, ‘What squadron did you serve with?’”
Even on this relatively cool day, it gets hot in a hurry. The pilots slide open the cockpit windows soon after touchdown. Small wonder why most crewmen are shirtless in the WW II photos.

Panchito’s
history
The plane’s first commander, Capt. Don Seiler, christened the aircraft Panchito in 1945 after a feisty rooster character from the Walt Disney cartoon, “The Three Cabellaros.”

Seiler, a 22-year-old squad-ron commander with the 396th Bomb Group based on Okinawa, took the plane on 19 missions over Japan during the last two months of World War II. The six-man crew flew its last combat mission on Aug. 12, 1945, six days after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Panchito was idle for several years after the war before it served several civilian roles. In the 1970s, it was a mosquito sprayer in South Florida, flying under the name “Big Bertha.”

The aircraft has a local history. It came to Kissimmee in spectacular fashion in the late 1970s when it landed on U.S. Highway 192 and was housed at the SST museum between Kissimmee and St. Cloud, now the site of Life Academy.

It took about six years for Flying Tigers Warbird Museum operator Tom O’Reilly to restore the aircraft at the Kissimmee airport before it was sold in 1986. Kelley acquired it about a decade later.

Thom Richard, who with Graham Meise owns Warbird Adventures and the Kissimmee Air Museum at Gateway Airport, acted as Panchito’s host.

“We help out however we can. People enjoy seeing the big warbirds,” Richard said. “It’s a real piece of history.”

Vintage plane buffs can catch a ride anytime on one of Warbird Adventures’ two T-6 single-engine trainers. The museum also has several more restored planes on display, including an operating flying car.

Broker said muscling Panchito through the sky is radically different from piloting commercial jets.

“It’s all manual flying. It’s a lot more fun, and something not many people can do,” he said. “The funny thing is, I work more now as a volunteer than I ever did at Delta.”

Kelley said Panchito  is a flying history lesson, one that educates the young and honors those who served and died during the war. Eleven of the Doolittle Raiders were killed or captured when their planes crashed or crash-landed for lack of fuel. Three were executed by the Japanese as war criminals, and another died in captivity. Several more of the 80 men on the Doolittle raid later died on other missions. The enraged Japanese killed an estimated 250,000 Chinese for their assistance in helping the Doolittle survivors escape.

“We can’t forget the sacrifices they made,” Kelley said.
Editor’s Note: Staff Writer Rick Pedone took a ride on Panchito April 9 as a courtesy to the media.