Wing Men

David Wigley of Smithtown, New York, pilots Boeing 767s for American Airlines in what he calls his “full-size life.” His entry in the Top Gun Masters class this year will be a Westland Wyvern, a British Royal Navy strike fighter from the early 1950s. Wigley designed and built the obscure plane from scratch over four years. Among its details are counter-rotating propellers, a droppable torpedo, and a functioning pneumatic tail hook for landing on model aircraft carriers.

But Selby and Johns, also 53, have built a Top Gun dream team over the years, and the roster inspires confidence. Their crew includes Bangkok scale-jet-engine builder Pornchai “Hard Porn” Saechour and pit crew/logistician Bill Davidson. By virtue of his position as administrative assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, Davidson is the top career civilian in the U.S. Air Force, and he may know more about military aircraft than anyone alive. (According to his wife, Peg, he can sit inside their house and identify just about any overflying plane by sound alone.) Practice time for the flight crew is limited to a week each January, when Selby, Johns and Davidson rendezvous in Bangkok to shake out their latest flying machine, party, and prepare for Top Gun.

Even though Selby’s team has never won the overall Team class at Top Gun, Selby has won more Critics’ Choice awards—bestowed each year by the judges and a panel of “guest artists” for exceptional craftsmanship —than anyone else. In 2001 (the first year Johns and Selby flew together), they won it with an F7 Grumman Tigercat, a late-1940s fighter. In 2004, a Brewster Buffalo (which now hangs at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida) brought them another, and in 2005 and 2006 it was a Vought Vindicator SBU-2 (a carrier-based dive bomber developed for the U.S. Navy in the 1930s). Last year, their Tucano was so impressive that even after crashing, it was still named a runner-up.

This year’s plane is an ambitious choice. The real-life A-10 Thunderbolt II, a.k.a. the Warthog, was the first Air Force jet specifically designed for close air support of ground forces. Its distinguishing characteristics make it an especially difficult plane to model. The A-10 weighs in at 30,000 pounds, and its engines produce 18,000 pounds of thrust. True to its nickname, the fighter, all bumps and protrusions, isn’t sleek. Rather, it’s built to take—and inflict—a beating. From a cockpit protected by a titanium “bathtub,” a pilot can drop up to eight tons of bombs or fire a 30-millimeter Gatling gun at 4,000 rounds a minute. “On a battlefield,” Davidson says, “there’s probably nothing more intimidating than an A-10 coming at you on a strafing run.”

But the flight characteristics of the A-10 make it a tremendous engineering challenge. At Top Gun, a model must not only be built to scale, it must fly to scale as well. “They’re judging realism in flight,” Selby explains. “If the real airplane makes bombing runs at 300 knots, a smaller plane has to do its bombing runs at a much slower speed, or else it won’t look realistic. You’ve got to duplicate whether it climbs steeply or gradually, whether it turns quickly like a fighter jet or sluggishly like a heavy bomber. The A-10 is a tough one, because it’s known to have excellent maneuverability at low air speeds and altitudes, so we’ve got to make that happen.”

Although Selby’s A-10 Warthog is strictly a hobbyist project (albeit an expensive one), it has the tacit support of the Pentagon, where his work has high-placed admirers. “A couple of years ago,” Johns recalls, “[Air Force chief of staff] General Buzz Moseley was challenging us to fly an Air Force plane, instead of the Navy planes we had been flying for the past few years. It wasn’t exactly an order, but he said he was getting impatient. He wanted to know when we were going to get around to putting one of our birds into the air.”

In the Team class at Top Gun, competitors replicate a particular aircraft, rather than just a type. Selby’s team settled on an A-10 flown by Captain P.J. Johnson, who is now a colonel based in a Pentagon office just down the hall from both Johns and Davidson. The plane, built in the early 1980s and painted in the Air Combat Command’s Flying Tigers color scheme, is based out of Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. In the first Iraq war, in 1991, Johnson’s A-10 wing was partially blown off in combat. Remarkably, he managed to land safely.