Pilot Misses His ‘Dream Machine’
By Nikki Waller, The Miami Herald
If pilot and plane are like dance partners, Sean Tucker and his Oracle Challenger, a souped-up Pitts S-2S, were like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They zoomed into the troposphere and defied gravity, tumbling and twirling across the sky.
But on April 4, Tucker and the custom-built aerobatics plane, which he’d flown for 11 years, danced their last airborne dance. An elevator controlling the plane’s tail failed during a practice flight.
Soon after, high above farmland outside Shreveport, La., Tucker bailed out, pulling his parachute at 5,000 feet.
Tucker landed unscathed, but Oracle Challenger crashed nearby.
Tucker, 53, and his plane have been regulars at the Air & Sea Show in Fort Lauderdale for many years, where his high-speed rolls and drops thrilled spectators and churned more than a few stomachs.
Tucker will be back in the air for this year’s show, but instead of Oracle Challenger, he’ll perform a safety demonstration in a Columbia 400, a four-passenger general-aviation plane.
For fans of Tucker’s high-energy aerobatics, the spectacle will be technically exciting but somewhat limited — the equivalent of the world’s most talented tango dancer taking the floor with your mother-in-law.
There will be rolls and loops, but "we don’t get to dance it," Tucker said.
On the message boards of aerobatics fan sites such as flightlevel350.com, messages of relief at Tucker’s safety mixed with heartfelt eulogies for the biplane.
One person wrote: "If you have ever seen or heard of this guy, you know he is quite possibly the best aerobatic performer on Earth. Oh the horrid sight of that crumpled Pitts. . . . . . "
As Tucker prepared to bail out from 5,000 feet, he stood up on the seat and steadied himself.
Moving at 120 mph along with the plane, Tucker grasped the tail as he dropped. For one brief moment, the two hung in an eerie ballet. No panic, their last moment.
"See ya later, girl," he said, and pushed off into nothing.
Even now, Tucker says the memory brings tears to his eyes.
"We were so close. She was my dream machine," he said.
He steered to a field where sheriff’s deputies were waiting and fearing the worst. He stumbled as he hit the ground, and his beloved plane crashed nearby.
A backup airplane nearly identical to Oracle Challenger is being tuned up and will be ready to fly next month, but Karl Koeppen, a fellow member of Team Oracle, said it won’t be the same. "There’s not much love for that airplane," he said.
But Air & Sea Show fans can look forward to next year, when a new, rebuilt Challenger will take to the skies.
Not long after Tucker’s safe landing in Louisiana, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, the team’s sponsor, called with good wishes and vowed to build Tucker a new plane, with the same craftsmen and engineers who built it the first time around.
"All those memories of passion for flight and love for creativity, it’s humbling," Tucker said. "The same people are going to put it back together. And we’re going to make it better."
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