In a photo from 1942, Calistogan Irv Williams stands proudly beside the plane, a PT-19 trainer, in which he had just made his first solo flight. Submitted photos
Irv Williams' flight legacy: It's all up in the air
By John Lindblom
The Weekly Calistogan
Somewhere over Sonoma County, Irv Williams had a very close brush with a stunt plane while flying a small plane. The mid-’70s incident ended his days as an aviator who had flown in three wars and logged 7,000 hours of ferrying everything from war casualties to Christmas gifts for flood victims, as well as training countless young fliers for air combat.
In his four decades aloft Williams performed:
• Flight instruction for Army Air Corps fighter pilots during World War II;
• Ground instruction for Air Force sabre jet pilots during the Korean War;
• Countless missions “aero-vacing” the fallen and wounded from Saigon to Tokyo during the Vietnam War; and
• Airlifting life-sustaining supplies to Eastern Europeans behind the Iron Curtain, and — closer to home — victims of what was called the “Thousand-Year Flood” in towns along the Eel River.
Mementos from the many adventures in Williams’ distinguished career as a pilot are neatly arrayed in a corner of the Chateau Calistoga mobile home where he and wife Zelda live. They were among the first to arrive in 1975 and now are the park’s longest-standing residents.
The corner space is a veritable one-room museum.
Teaching pilots
Williams was 20 when he joined the Army Air Corps, three days before Pearl Harbor and a scant two weeks into junior college near Bakersfield.
He passed a battery of flying qualification tests and the Army waived its requirement of two collegiate years so that he could enter air cadet training.
“So I went down to San Antonio for basic preflight,” Williams said. “I learned to fly in a plane almost like Lindbergh flew — wooden propeller (that had to be set in motion manually), open cockpit and no radio. The only way you could communicate with the instructor was through a tube with speaker horns, or else he yelled at you. We’d have to take a broom to sweep the frost off the wings in the mornings and you can imagine how cold it was flying with an open cockpit.”
Not long after Williams graduated he was appointed a squadron commander at Travis Air Force Base, teaching fighter pilots elusive sky maneuvers five at a time for four-week training intervals for about a year.
The war ended before he saw action.
Serving others in crisis
He was a reserve officer and Civil Service operative when the Air Force beckoned him to train jet pilots for combat in Korea, and, in the interim between Korea and Vietnam he spent two weeks performing twice-a-day missions in “Flying Boxcars” in relief of flood victims in the Central Valley during the worst flood in contemporary Northern California history. The flood lasted from Christmas Day 1964 through New Year’s Day 1965.
“We flew from Sacramento to Martinez,” Williams said. “The only way you could get into (the flooded area) was by helicopter or boat. All the roads were washed out and about every three days another storm moved in.
“We flew in everything you could stick on an airplane, up to and including Highway Patrol cars and hay for the livestock — those that survived,” he added.
Flying in planeloads of Christmas gifts, Williams was an airborne Santa.
Later, he was mustered back into his lieutenant colonel uniform for six months temporary duty in Europe as operations officer and squadron commander for airlifting to Iron Curtain countries.
“We didn’t call it the Berlin Airlift, but we were still flying the (Airlift) corridor and we made many missions into Berlin,” Williams remembers. “We flew all over Europe.”
Bringing back the dead
His last and most solemn military task was the extended series of flights he made that were the first stage of bringing America’s war dead and wounded home from Vietnam. His Globemaster aircraft was given essentially the same priorities as Air Force One in takeoffs, landings and commanding air space.
In all of Williams’ many missions in the Far East and Europe, there was never a crash landing. But he did have one in a civilian training session at Randolph.
“A student and I crashed at takeoff,” he recalled. “I was sitting there fat, dumb and happy, so he caught me a little bit short when he revved back on the stick, which made the plane go into a dive. The plane stalled and came down on its left wing. It hit nose-first and tore the engine out and tore the wing and tail off.”
Williams escaped with only a serious bump on his head and a nine-day hospital stay “just to see if I’d start acting dumb.”