Butler Hangar

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Aircraft Hangar

There is a little known piece of film history in Northern Santa Rosa at the airport, now called the Charles M. Shultz Sonoma County Airport.

While Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) gets most of the movie history headlines in Santa Rosa, an aircraft hangar was the site of a hair-raising flying stunt in the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

The Butler Hangar was built in 1943, the same year that Shadow was released. The airfield was used during World War Two as a training field. Sixty pilot lost their lives while training here.

One of my favorite fighters, the F-4 Phantom II with the Butler Hangar in the background. As a kid I built an F-4 model and painted it in a similar camo paint scheme.

After the war the airfield, including the hangar, was returned to civilian use and it has been in continuous use since World War Two.

Field sketching at the airfield at the Pacific Coast Air Museum. My sketching backrest was an auxiliary fuel tank from a F-105F Thunderchief.

The hangar was featured in a very short clip of the epic comedy, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. It is a screwball road film where a cast of crazed characters, featuring a who’s who of comedy, races across the west coast to find some stolen money ($350,000). Most race in cars while a few travel by air.

Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney are forced to fly the twin engine Beech 18-D because the pilot/owner Jim Backus is passed out drunk or possibly dead in the back.

What ensues is some wild flying including buzzing a control tower and flying through a billboard sign (this stunt was the film’s most dangerous and caused damage to the plane).

The pilot who performed the stunts was the one-legged Frank Tallman, a veteran and legend Hollywood stunt flyer.

The stunt was performed on December 4, 1962. Tallman made two low test passes and then lined up to the west of the hangar and speed through, pulling up to avoid hitting trees to the east. He did the stunt in one take and refused to do another pass.

Looking west through the hangar. Tallman flew the Beech 18-D from this direction. The hangars in the background were not built in 1962.

The hangar is now part of the Pacific Coast Air Museum which has an impressive collection of aircraft including the F-4 Phantom, F-16 Viper, F-14 Tomcat, F-15 Eagle, F/A-18 Hornet, A-7A Corsair, A-4 Skyhawk, and many more.

This F-8U Crusader was essentially a playground toy in a San Franciscan park, also known as “the plane in the park”. It was at Larsen Park for 20 years and I remember seeing it as my family drove north on 19th Avenue in the Sunset District. The plane was damaged from vandalism and the foggy maritime weather and was moved to Santa Rosa in 1993 and cosmetically restored.

Beech 18

Near the perimeter fence and away from the limelight of the other planes in the museum’s collection sits a silver wingless, moterless twin engine plane that has clearly seen better days.

This is a Beech 18, the same plane that flew through the Butler Hangar.

In the future, plans are to restore the plane (they have the wings somewhere) and display the Beech next to the hangar made famous in an epic comedy.