JOLIET, Ill. – After Jack Roush was seriously injured in a plane crash in 2002 in Alabama, one of the first people the NASCAR team owner talked to outside his immediate family was fellow pilot Jimmy Leeward.
When Roush had his accident last year at the Oshkosh airport in Wisconsin, the first time he got back in a plane behind the controls, Leeward was his co-pilot.
And just two days ago, Leeward and Roush talked about how Leeward was doing at the National Championship Air Races in Reno.
So Roush walked around Chicagoland Speedway with a heavy heart Saturday morning thinking about his friend, who died when his P-51 Mustang crashed Friday into the stands, killing at least four on the ground and wounding more than 55 others.
Roush, who also owns a P-51 Mustang, talked about his memories of Leeward, a 74-year-old expert pilot who had appeared in movies as a stunt pilot and owned the Leeward Air Ranch in Florida.
“Three months after [Oshkosh] as I was re-committing myself to maintain my status as a pilot and to re-engage in that effort, Jimmy called me and said, ‘Are you ready yet’ about 60 days after,” Roush said.
“I said, ‘Give me another 30 days.’ He called me back 30 days later, ‘Are you ready to fly? I want to fly with you.’
“I have a World War II-era trainer that has two sets of controls, and Jimmy was the first one to climb in the back seat with me as I got back in the air. We’ve always been that close. We’ve been very, very close. … I’m very sad.”
The plane Leeward was flying Friday had several innovations that weren’t based in history but more of an engineering exercise to race in that event, Roush said. Leeward had just started racing the P-51 – called “Galloping Ghost” – last year to the delight of the crowds.
“That plane had raced in the ’70s for sure and maybe the ’60s,” Roush said. “So it had a history of being at Reno as a racer. Jimmy brought some new technology to it, he brought some innovation to it; he brought his own personal investment and time and energy to it.
“He worked on it a whole year, maybe a year-and-a-half.”
Roush said he has tried to figure out what happened from afar. He speculated something happened to a trim tab, a movable piece on the outside part of the plane that is controlled by a pilot to help steer the plane.
“The pictures that I saw looked like it had a flight control surface that was impacted by a trim tab that vibrated or fell off the airplane – the loads that the airplanes have for all the control surfaces are extraordinarily high and there was some fastener, some resin, some harmonic that it went through that was unanticipated that caused him to lose control of the airplane,” Roush said.
Roush said he met Leeward at a sports-car race where they both were competing in the mid-1980s and they talked about their affinity for planes from the World War II era.
“I said, ‘You’ve got a P-51 Mustang over on the ramp, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s mine,’” Roush said. “I told him, ‘I’ll have one of those one day.’”
In 1994, Roush bought one of the planes and he soon got a call from Leeward asking him when he was going to fly it.
“He did a formation takeoff with me when I had probably less than 20 hours in the airplane,” Roush said. “So he was extraordinarily brave, courageous and a dear friend.”
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