Wing Men

Selby also built a high-pressure pneumatic system to handle the landing gear, gear doors and braking system. He designed and machined his own hydraulic shock absorbers out of aircraft-grade aluminum and even molded his own rubber tires. Up front, there’s an onboard replica of the A-10’s Gatling gun.

When the A-10’s canopy opens, it reveals an action figure wearing a jumpsuit meticulously sewn by a Bangkok dressmaker to match P.J. Johnson’s. On the tiny plastic control panel, each instrument is laser-engraved; the panel even pulses and appears to acquire a target. “There are no extra points awarded for cockpit detail,” Selby says, “but if you’re going to go to this much trouble, you might as well take it all the way.”

Inside the Warthog:  L-Dopa

Small Plane, Big Risk

Considering the time, craftsmanship, dedication and money that has gone into this airplane, it’s a wonder that Selby can summon the guts to send it into the air. But that’s the nature of the Top Gun competition: Build a complex, delicate machine, and then risk destroying it.

Selby and Johns suspect that radio interference might have caused their Tucano’s crash at Top Gun last year. If that’s the case, the “radio hit” must have come from somewhere off-field, since all other competitors’ radios are impounded and disabled during competition. But according to Top Gun organizer Tiano, radios have become so sophisticated that they are rarely the cause of crashes anymore. “When we do have equipment failures,” he says, “it’s usually a problem with fuel or with batteries. But even those are getting more rare.”

Tiano, who was standing next to Johns when the Tucano went down, thinks the plane probably didn’t have enough airspeed as it entered a turn, causing it to stall and plunge to the ground. “It looked a little slow to me,” Tiano says. “But we’ll never know for sure.”

Selby has learned his limits the hard way, losing several planes over the years. Although he was once a commercially rated multiengine pilot, Selby claims he doesn’t have the right stuff to fly the model planes he builds for competition. “I’d probably consider it,” he says, “if my best friend didn’t happen to be one of the world’s best pilots.”

Ray Johns made his first solo flight at 16 and studied the certification of commercial aircraft for military applications while getting his master’s degree. As a flight instructor, he’s flown most of the Air Force’s fighter and air-to-ground jets and was the chief test pilot for an Air Force One project in 1990 in which the military radically modified a Boeing 747-200 for presidential use.