Aviator lauded for long support of Air Force
SAN ANTONIO — Ollie Crawford received an exceptionally rare honor and made history in the process: He flew in a U-2 spy plane.
At 84, he was the oldest person ever to do that.
The Air Force gave the San Antonio retiree another high honor when he was buried Monday at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery: a four-plane “missing man” formation of F-16s.
Crawford, a businessman, lawyer and aviator who died July 21, two days after his 94th birthday, was a World War II fighter pilot who flew the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a plane made famous by his friend David Lee “Tex” Hill of the Flying Tigers, a group of American volunteers recruited by China to fight Japan before Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war.
But he was more than that. The dignitaries at Shelter No. 4, among them former Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters and retired Gen. Ronald Fogleman, a former Air Force chief of staff, lauded his long-running support of the service as a civilian.
Peters said Monday’s flyover was a fitting tribute to Crawford, a “fighter pilot’s fighter pilot” who flew “almost every airplane in the Air Force inventory.” Fogleman called him a self-made patriot with broad interests who “was instrumental in the formation of the Air Force Memorial Foundation, which resulted in that magnificent monument that we have in Washington dedicated to all the young men and women who have served in the past, serve now and will serve in the future.”
The tributes came in from Washington, too.
“Ollie was a great American — an aviator, leader and statesman,” the Air Force’s current chief of staff, Gen. David L. Goldfein, said in a prepared statement. Acting Air Force Secretary Matthew Donovan described Crawford as “a larger-than-life guy who had boundless energy to improve the U.S. Air Force for generations of airmen who would serve after him.”
Oliver Ray Crawford joined the Army Air Corps at 18, earning his wings in 1945. He got into World War II too late to see combat, served 13 years in the Air Force Reserve and emerged in the following decades as a tireless advocate for the Air Force.
His love affair with the P-40 would last 60 years, but he flew many other planes — nearly 100 of them, logging more than 13,000 hours in the air.
A charter member of the Air Force Association, a nonprofit support group that promotes aerospace education, he became its president, served on its board and in 1989 was named its “Man of the Year.” The Air Force later honored Crawford with its Exceptional Service Award for his work promoting stealth technology to Congress. He also received the Commanders Cross of the Order of Merit from the president of West Germany in 1972.
As chairman of the Air Force Memorial Foundation, he was a driving force in making the monument in Arlington, Va., a reality. Peters, a Washington lawyer who served as the Air Force’s top civilian under President Bill Clinton, said Crawford and a group of World War II veterans pushed hard for it and that he was “intimately involved in the memorial from the day it started in the early ’90s to the day it was commissioned in 2006.”
“The major donor was Ross Perot Jr.,” Peters said. “But he was not by any means the only donor. It’s really Ollie and several other retired folks who made this thing.”
Crawford, an Amarillo native, had projects and interests close to home, too, one of them the P-40 he owned and often flew — in the early 2000s making a dead-stick belly landing in the sand in Arizona after the engine went out at 11,000 feet and walking away from it.
“In his 80s, he’s flying like a 25year-old pilot in the Air Force,” said a longtime friend, retired Air Force Col. James G. “Snake” Clark, 67, of Lorton, Va.
Retired Air Force Col. Gary Baber said Crawford was a member of the San Antonio-area chapter of the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots Association, a national group, and regularly attended its meetings.
His P-40 was something of a calling card, bearing “48” on the fuselage, the number Hill had when he flew as a Flying Tiger. Crawford flew that plane and others at Commemorative Air Force events from 1959 through 2006.
“That’s what made him such an interesting person, that he was still actively involved in flying,” said Baber, 80, of Selma. Baber is a former fighter pilot and Vietnam veteran with 5,000 hours in the F-4 and F-15.
“He took great pride in being an American, a Texan and an airman,” said retired Air Force Col. John Correll, a one-time editor at Air Force magazine. “We will also remember that he took such pleasure in flying the P-40 that the rest of us enjoyed it along with him.”
Crawford founded the Randolph Airpower Community Council and the San Antonio Airpower Heritage Foundation, said Mark Frye, a former consultant to Port San Antonio and a base closure expert. The council was created to protect Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph from closure, and the foundation aimed to build an education center at Port San Antonio.
“He was a friend, mentor and an inspiration to many in the San Antonio community,” Frye said.
Crawford often made an impression. Retired Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Bob Laymon remembered the first time he met him, during an Air Force Association convention in Washington in 1990.
“When he came around to our Beechcraft T-1A Jayhawk and T-6A Texan II industry booth, I took note that this was not just a standard executive photo-op; rather, a learning and information-gathering visit,” said Laymon, 69, of San Antonio, a Vietnam veteran.
“Ollie listened intensely to become literate on the next generation of Joint Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training. Later, we were reunited on the steering committee for the Brooks Field Legacy Salute gala in 2013. It was as if 23 years were just yesterday.”
The flight in the U-2 only added to the lore. Getting a ride aboard the famous spy plane included a flight physical, not a slam dunk at his age.
“When I proposed that, the entire chain of command in the Air Force, from the commander of Air Combat Command to the chief of staff of the Air Force, it was, within seconds, ‘We would be honored to have Ollie fly,’” said Clark, a former Air Force fighter pilot who works in the Pentagon.
“I was a little nervous, because he was in great physical shape at 84 but you still have to go through a very, very lengthy Air Force physical, and he did great,” Clark added. “And it was funny because once he came out of the flight surgeon (office), the flight surgeon smiled at me, and I immediately called the chief of the Air Force, and said, ‘He passed!’”
Wearing a pressure suit and strapped into the plane, Crawford then did far more than observe. He piloted it himself for most of the mission, flown above 50,000 feet.
“He was as high as a man can get,” Clark said, “without being on the (International) Space Station.”