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INDUS — Wayne Foster spent much of his life chasing the horizon as a fighter pilot, but he could be facing his toughest battle yet: parting with the warbird he built by hand.
At 88, Foster is selling one of his planes: a smaller-scale replica of a P-40 Warhawk with the Royal Air Force’s 1940 desert colours of the 112 Squadron. The asking price is $45,000.
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“It’s like losing an old friend,” he said, sitting in front of the plane stored inside a Quonset hut in Indus, Alta., a hamlet southeast of Calgary.
Foster, who joined the Canadian Forces in 1956, served in the navy, spent three years in France and worked at an electronic warfare unit in Montreal for another four years.
It was in the navy that he earned his nickname, Butch.
“I got the name Butch from Butcher, from dogfighting, I guess,” Foster said in an interview.
“We had a couple of guys in the squadron whose name was Wayne. I got Butch and my wingman got Chopper.”
During his time, he said, they did a lot of dogfighting in Europe. Dogfighting is a series of tactical manoeuvres used in close-range aerial combat.
“I learned how to dogfight fairly well … by trial and error,” he said. “Thankfully, I could do a lot of errors when no one was shooting at me.”
He also had a tour in Puerto Rico. He was transferred to the United States Air Force for three years, where he trained pilots in the art of dogfighting.
“That was a wonderful tour. I flew the T-38 Talon — it goes like hell,” he chuckled.
He remembers briefly sharing the sky with Chuck Yeager, an American flying ace and record-setting test pilot who, in October 1947, became the first pilot in history confirmed to have exceeded the speed of sound.
Foster said he tried to “bounce” Yeager, an unexpected attack to initiate a dogfight.
“He was coming up from Spain in a 104 and I couldn’t catch him,” Foster laughed. “He was much faster than I was, but I got the opportunity to talk to him later on in Germany.”
In selling his replica, Foster admits he never got to fly a real P-40 Warhawk.
“But I’ve flown the P-51s and it’s very similar in some ways. It doesn’t have a big honking engine on it, but fortunately, this one here doesn’t have a big honking engine on it either,” he said.
Mechanic Pieter Terblanche has been working on the Warhawk.
“It’s in very good shape for the time it’s been sitting,” he said. “Everyone that buys a plane has their own idea on what needs to be done to the plane. It can be done pretty fast.”
Foster’s daughter Tracy said the plan was to have it placed in a museum, but there have been several people who expressed interest in buying it.
Offers have been outlandish, she added.
“We’ve had a couple of crazy offers, like $500 and a case of beer, and I went nope. And then it was $5,000 and a case of beer,” she said.
One person offered $200, she said, but it turned out he thought it was a model he could fly using a remote control.
Her father has never spoken much about his time as a fighter pilot, she said.
“Now that he’s getting a little older, he’s opening up a little bit more as to what he experienced.”
— by Bill Graveland
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