Our Wings
Memoir of a Reno Crash Survivor

Softcover, 266 pages, includes 21 photographs, 1 printing 2017

by Doug Clough

I am a pilot. At age 63, my world is rocked when my two closest friends, ex-fighter pilots, sell their planes. What? Why? We’d flown together for twenty years! Ten of them, performing at airshows as the Luscombe Formation Team! But there’s no way around it – they’re calling it quits. “Wait! Just because we’re done, you’re not off the hook. Get a grip … Navy reject, for God’s sake! We’ve invested a lot of years trying to make a pilot out of you. It’s time to step up and take the freakin’ baton!”

What? It’s about payback? It had been my lifelong dream, to fly a single-seat fighter, after watching an uncle buzz my grandparents’ house in a Hellcat, when I was four. Two years later finding his dusty copy of Your Wings in their attic, a text for aviation cadets of World War II. Absorbing that book by flashlight in my attic bedroom. Yearning for my chance to fly. A dream brought to reality by perseverance and hard work.

And then, during the Reno Air Races, on September 16, 2011, at St. Mary’s Hospital, absorbing the realization that I was a survivor. After hurling myself toward the ridge tops as the P-51D Galloping Ghost at 500 miles an hour smashed itself into a maelstrom of razor blades and machetes on the tarmac, barely a dozen feet from where I’d been standing. Veteran race pilot, Jimmy Leeward, and ten others, dead. The propeller, a whirl of slashing swords. Yet, I'd survived.

No, it's not about payback! It’s about urgent necessity! That which had impelled the students of Your Wings, now compels us to sustain the accomplishments of their generation. It's about casting aside easy passivity, to stand up for what we have. Family, friends, freedom, faith. It's about Our Wings!