A lifetime in the sky

Bennet now operates and flies an extensive collection of historic and aerobatic aircraft, including the Hawker Sea Fury, de Havilland Vampire, F4U Corsair, CAC Wirraway, T-28 Trojan, Grumman Avenger and two Yak-52 aircraft. He maintains the collection while regularly flying Mustang, Kitty Hawk, and Hurricane fighters, competing in aerobatics and performing internationally, and he spoke to us about his lifelong love of flight.

AA: Where does your passion for aircraft stem from?

Paul Bennet: I just always loved aviation in general. I was lucky enough to go for a ride in an aeroplane when I was younger, and I guess I caught the bug and kept going.

I knew that I was keen to be involved in aviation, and when I was young I flew model aeroplanes, control line first and then radio control, and I still do fly RC aeroplanes.

A friend of mine had recently gone solo in a two-seat Pitts Special, and I was lucky enough to go for a ride with him after flying models one day. That was awesome. I knew I’d love it, and I did. That was on a Sunday afternoon, and then the following Monday I was at the aero club trying to get my pilot’s licence.

AA: Were you always interested in military aircraft? Where did the involvement of those aircraft come from?

PB: They’re iconic, cool aeroplanes that are fantastic to fly. They’re all different, I guess. I like the fighters because they’re aerobatic; you can do loops, rolls, wingovers off Cubans, barrel rolls, point rolls and so on, which comes from the aerobatic background a little bit.

I’ve got a real passion for aerobatics, and that’s why I still compete in aerobatics. I think that on the aerobatic side you shouldn’t be flying a high-performance aerobatic aeroplane in an air show unless you’ve at least won advanced in the Australian aerobatic championships or at least a state comp, you know, against some good competitors or at least got a real, real high score that shows you’re capable of winning.

But then that converts to when you fly Spitfire, Mustang, Kitty Hawk, Seafury, whatever. Obviously, they’re high-performance in a different way. They’re high-performance warbirds. So we don’t pull high Gs in them, but they’re certainly moving quick, running in at 400 knots in a Sea Fury. So you need to be pretty accurate with where you’re aiming at 400 knots. And then you know, you’ve got to make your speeds and gates to achieve what you want to achieve acrobatically.

AA: Is there a personal favourite? A particular plane you like to fly the most?

PB: I love them all, to be honest. I like the Sea Fury, I like the Spitfire, I like them all. They’re all different in their own way. They all have different harmony and balance in the controls. The Mustang is easy to go fast in, the Sea Fury is easy to go fast in, but the Spitfire is really nice and balanced in the controls; so is a Kittyhawk. They’re all pretty cool.

AA: How do you compare the performance difference between a modern propeller aircraft like a Hawker Sea Fury to an early jet like a de Havilland Vampire jet fighter?

PB: Well, the Sea Fury and the Vampire are very similar. I guess the Sea Fury was the highest performing. Well, it’s the fastest piston fighter ever designed and built. So it compares actually pretty closely with the Vampire. You’re running at 400 knots in both those aeroplanes. You could pretty much fly the same display in both. You could do formation aerobatics with both. They’re both British, and they feel quite similar to fly, to be honest.

AA: That sounds like a lot of storage and maintenance requirements to keep up to date. How do you keep them all running at the same time?

PB: I need to keep them all running; I get frustrated when they’re not running. So they’re all running. We house most of them in a museum at Scone; Hunter Fighter Collection is our museum that Ross Pay and I share. So in that are his Spitfire, Mustang, and Kitty or Stearman, Harvard, and Tiger Moth, and then we’ve got some shared aeroplanes. And then we’ve got my fleet also lives in there, and they’re on display. You can see them at Scone whenever you’re passing through, and it’s a fantastic facility that’s owned by the council. Ross and I run it with our teams.

AA: What sort of challenges do you face with parts and keeping everything active?

PB: There’s still a fair few parts around, but there are things that you have to make; we have to pull them apart, CNC them, make sure it’s made out of the right material, test it, make sure it’s right, and get it working. It’s the only way to do it these days.

You can make parts better than what they were back in the day. But to be honest, the way these old machines were built, they really were built in a hurry for the war. And they did a fantastic job, to be honest, with the design and the way they built them, and they built them so fast. I think it was a real credit to how well they did it.

AA: Vintage and wartime aircraft themselves would become more scarce over time. When you’re looking for one and the state of preservation, how does that process work?

PB: Well, it depends on what you want and how much money you got, really. You can buy anything you want if you’ve got enough money. That’s my problem. I just don’t have enough.

You know, like, when I’m ready to buy a Bearcat, I’m just going to be looking around. Try and find the right one. In this case, I don’t really have time to spend 10 years building it, although I am building a Spitfire that’ll probably take 10 years to finish. It just takes what it takes.

But I’d rather get a Bearcat sooner, so probably just find one that’s pretty good, and we might have to do bits and pieces to it.

The Sea Fury worked out really well – it’s been just about faultless. And the Corsair’s worked out well. You know, it was restored up in Mareeba (Queensland) by Mike Spalding and his team (at Warbird Adventures Mareeba). They did a great job on it; it’s a great machine to fly, and it’s been faultless as well.

You’re always going to have things happen with these machines, but if you’re nice to them, look after them properly, and maintain them. If we get a list of problems, we just fix them. We don’t wait until the annual inspection time and end up with a massive list. We just fix everything as it needs fixing. If you find something that’s not right, well then next week you’ve got to fix it.

AA: Preserving some of these aircraft would be expensive and technically demanding. Is there enough being done in Australia to support restoration and preservation of historical aircraft?

PB: Preserving them is difficult. They’re really cool things to be able to look after, but you’ve just got to do your best.

You can’t just go and buy whatever you need for it. Sometimes you’re going to have to engineer things. Let’s say we’re going to get brakes for the CAC Wirraway; well, we get them made overseas, we have a look at the original, we try and copy it, we make them, test them, and see that they’re pretty much as good as the originals. You just got to do something when there’s nothing left.

I think that there isn’t enough support for museums and these special interest groups, to be honest. Everyone’s starting to get a bit older now. I think there’s always more to do; that’s for sure. Several special interest groups like myself and Ross Bay and Temora [Aviation Museum] and Historical Aircraft Restoration Society are doing this work, but there can always be more done. Sometimes you feel like there’s not much support for it out there.

AA: If we look back at rival military aircraft, we see the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ and German aircraft like the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Are those aircraft still available to collectors, and do you plan to get any?

PB: I’d be comfortable flying them, but there are very few available. I think there are only two Bf 109s in the US, and I think there’s maybe one or two in the UK, but there aren’t many at all.

The Japanese Zero – I think there are only two Zeros in the world. There’s only one flying at the moment, and I think there’s another one almost ready to go. But there just aren’t enough of them, and there’s not enough to start with.

To go and build one is a massive undertaking. And to my knowledge, there are very few engines, so you have got to base an airframe around the availability of an engine. It’s not the same if you’ve got to go and put a Pratt and Whitney (engine) in something that should have had a Japanese engine in it, effectively.

The Bf 109 with the Daimler-Benz engine, for example, there aren’t many people in the world that can work on and get a Daimler-Benz going.

I want something that I can just push out and go flying. If it’s too cumbersome to fly, then you won’t fly them.

AA: How do the air shows help the public understand aviation and the role of military aviation? And the impact on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers?

PB: One of our big goals is to promote aviation in general to the next generation of aviators, whether it be private aviation, commercial aviation, pilots, anything involved with aviation really, as well as defence aviation. We obviously try pretty hard to promote defence aviation.

You really need a fast jet if you’ve got kids in the crowd. If kids in the crowd think they want to go to the Air Force, nothing gets them across the line as quickly as a fast jet does.

I’ve got my Vampire, and we’ve got an L-39 (Aero L-39 Albatros jet trainer), but it’s not the same as an F35 or a Hornet fighter jet.

Effectively, for the Air Force, we’re putting on a free platform for them to recruit at, so they should, if they were smart, they would get behind it and use it so they don’t have to spend their money on putting on their own air show. We can do air shows without them, but it just adds to the whole aspect of it.

Obviously, the more that you can provide for the public, the better the event’s going to be. That’s what it’s all about is you’ve got to give them something to remember so that when they get a little bit older and they’re considering what they’re going to do for a job, they consider aviation.

AA: What’s planned for Paul Bennet Air Shows over the next five to 10 years?

PB: Well, we’re always looking at new things…the bigger you can make it, the better. We’re always trying to present something new. We want to make sure that we can present fun family entertainment.

I think it’s really good for families to unite and have something to do as a family where they all got something out of it. You know, it’s not just for the dads and the sons. It’s for the daughters, the mums. That’s what makes me happy when people are having a great day out at the air show that we’ve provided for them.

I’d like to make this show bigger. I want to make air shows in general bigger and you know, get better attendance. Our show team is growing, our followings getting bigger, our marketing getting bigger and better. We’re doing more and more shows around the country so everything’s going really well there.

I’m doing shows in other parts of the world. Been doing one in South Korea every year for 20 something years. Doing some shows in America.

AA: How do the international shows differ to the air shows in Australia, for example in Korea and the US?

PB: They don’t have as much flying at the South Korean air show. I’m the only civilian that gets invited there. They’re pretty much all military. They don’t really have a whole lot of their own general aviation over there. They don’t have any aerobatic performers in South Korea so that’s why they continue to invite me.

The airspace in South Korea is actually pretty good. I’ve flown across South Korea several times from one show to the next.

Not so much in China. All the airspace in China is owned by the military, so trying to get a clearance or release to do it is quite difficult.

Americans are great. Flying in American airspace is awesome. It’s just so much easier than here. They’re accommodating, they make you feel welcome, they want to help you. They’re giving you weather updates; they give you suggestions. Over here, they just want you to not be there.

The US is a big country with a lot of people in it, obviously, and that’s where a lot of ex-military warbirds were built. There’s a lot still left over there from the war, and people have salvaged them and so on. I think that’s a great thing.

A lot of air shows are pretty well attended over there. All air shows in the US are very well supported by the military. I like flying there, and it made me feel welcome.

AA: Where can the aviation community, government and defence industry collaborate better to take advantage of aviation opportunities?

PB: On the recruitment side of things. If they [the ADF] could send a fast jet to a lot of air shows, that would really make a difference to recruiting and to how big the show is.

Makes no sense to me why they wouldn’t come and support it to get the free recruiting add-on.

When they want a graduation or something, they ring me up and say, can I come and fly for them? I take a P40 Kitty Hawk over there, and it takes a day out of my life. Go and do a display for them for a graduation of the Hawks or the F35s. We do all that free of charge. And then you’d like to think that, you know, you scratch the back and you get scratched back again would be nice, but it just doesn’t always work like that because the Air Force is just such a big moving operation. There’s a lot of personalities, a lot of people involved in it. And I think sometimes the decision makers don’t really know what happens at a lower level and what promises are made

For example, a squadron can ring me and say, “Can you come and support this event?” And I’ll go, “Yeah, no worries. It would be nice if you could support us with an F35.” And they might say they’ll do their best. You can’t complain, but obviously it’s not the squadron that’s stopping it.

AA: On the recruitment side of things, what are some of the benefits that young aviators can find in a flight career?

PB: If you’re pretty smart and you’ve done all right at school and you’re pretty good at maths and you’re good enough to fit through the fighter combat school and become a fighter pilot, obviously, that’s a pretty good way of life once you get to that point.

A lot of study and a lot of hard work to get there, obviously. But you know, if you don’t make it, you can still fly some pretty cool stuff.

If you don’t become a fighter pilot, you might be a heavy lift pilot, which I think would also be really great, and if you don’t go to the military and you want to do the general aviation route, there are scholarships available to be able to get your commercial licence at a reasonable price and then pay it back once you start working.

There are pretty easy avenues now to get into the airlines. Probably easier than what they were because there seems to be a shortage of pilots for the airlines. So I think that’s a good way to go.

Even commercial flying in general, whether it be firebombing, agricultural, being a bank runner (contract freight) pilot, there’s heaps of ways to get started.

It just depends how people are built and wired. There’re many different ways of getting into aviation. We have a light sport aircraft flight school that a lot of young people come to learn to fly at, and it makes me proud to give back to aviation and teach them how to fly.

I’m originally a boat builder, shipwright by trade, and that was an awesome trade to do, and I loved it, and I still do. But the aviation world, it’s just great having that three-dimensional aspect. I think there are a lot of good people in it and many good opportunities.

AA: Final question: is there a current aircraft in the Australian Defence Force, or another defence force internationally, that you’d like to get as it retires?

PB: Yeah, I probably wouldn’t mind an F16. My Vampire is a pretty good jet, but to be honest, it’s just primitive. You can’t put the throttle on too quick, or you’re going to over-temp it and stuff like that.

Whereas in the modern jets you can just push the throttle forward and the computer takes care of it. The F16, you just push the throttle forward and have a good time, I reckon. So I think that’d be a pretty cool thing to have.