PARKER RATHBUN » HIGH SKY WING PILOT, COMMEMORATIVE AIR FORCE (NAKAJIMA BN5 REPLICA, T-6, PT-19)
“Flying Tora is so fun!”
At just 22 years old, Parker Rathbun is one of the newest in a long line of warbird pilots who have been a part of the Commemorative Air Force’s (CAF) iconic “Tora, Tora, Tora” flight demonstration, a living history lesson that brings to life the events of December 7, 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Last April’s Great Texas Airshow at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph marked Parker’s debut with Tora, flying one of the CAF’s three replica Nakajima BN5 “Kate” torpedo bombers. The CAF’s BN5s are part of the group of Kate replicas originally built for the famed 1970 movie, “Tora, Tora, Tora!”
Fifty-two years later, seven of the nine T-6 Texanbased replicas created for the film remain, having created a lot of airshow history in their own right.
Rathbun’s participation in Tora is a rite of passage into the warbird world many before him have made.
“You start thinking about how many guys have flown them and the people that have taken care of them,” Rathbun marvels. “I really wanted to fly a full season of Tora with the current guys, the old guard like Mike Burke [lead pilot], because it will be really cool looking back that I got to fly with that generation of pilots!”
Burke has been flying with Tora for five decades, more than twice as long as Rathbun has been alive. But Parker has packed a lot of experience into his 22 years. His aviation passion was inspired by his father, Daniel Rathbun, a longtime corporate pilot, Tora pilot and newly minted pilot of the CAF’s “Tex Hill” P-40N Warhawk.
From childhood, Rathbun flew radio-control model aircraft, a hobby he continues today. By the age of 12,
he’d already had the opportunity to ride along in the Dassault Falcon 2000 bizjets his dad flew and started flying his family’s Beech Musketeer with his flight instructor father.
Volunteering with the CAF started in 2014 for Rathbun, cleaning, polishing, and doing light work on
“You have no time or energy to be nervous,” he says. ...“You focus on your tarps [flying over pyrotechnics], your pattern, and who you’re following. You’re just flying your part of the show and it’s really a blast!”
warbirds while getting to fly in the local wing’s T-6 when his dad checked out in it that year. By 2016, Daniel Rathbun had a T-6 of his own, having purchased an AT6F best known for its air racing exploits as Pat Palmer’s #99 “Gotcha!”
Soon thereafter, Rathbun qualified for his private license and, with tailwheel time already accumulated in a Super Decathlon, started flying his family’s T-6.
“I really got used to how it handled from the back seat for a year and a half, then hopped in the front seat when I was 17,” Rathbun says, adding that he and his father practiced crosswind landings over and over until one day when his dad said, “Taxi over here real quick.”
“We had just done some landings and he hopped out of the back seat. I flew it around the pattern by myself. It was cool.”
Racking up many more hours in the T-6 with and without his father was followed by T-6 formation clinics and gaining enough time and experience that he was invited to qualify as one of the Tora pilots.
“I had gotten to see Tora ever since I was a little kid and meet some of the guys doing that when I was 14 or 15. When I was 17, I went to the yearly Tora practice for the first time with my dad. It was something I definitely wanted to do and I really started learning the pattern of what they do then, watching and standing in the back of debriefs or discussions.”
In 2021, Rathbun acted as a ferry pilot flying the Kate to airshows in Topeka, Kansas and EAA’s massive Air Venture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
For the last two years, he’s also been a corporate pilot, flying charters in a Pilatus PC-12. This year he has dialed back his corporate work to allow himself to fly with Tora.
“You have no time or energy to be nervous,” he says. “You focus on your tarps [flying over pyrotechnics], your pattern, and who you’re following. You’re just flying your part of the show and it’s really a blast!”