[Doug Taylor]

Info about "Air Farce One":

High-larious
Air Farce One

“My wife says I’m a wing nut,” says Salt Lake City’s Dave Chapman. “Anything with wings, I’m nutty for.”

It must be in the blood. Chapman’s father, mother, and brother all flew some kind of aircraft, and even his eighty-something father-in-law, a pilot in World War II, still enjoys heading off to the wild blue yonder.

As for Chapman himself? After graduating from the Air Force Academy with a degree in aeronautical engineering and flying F-16 fighter jets, he became a commercial pilot. He flies 767’s at work and hang gliders in his spare time. He’s even this close to finishing a homemade plane.

All in all, Chapman has logged over 14,000 hours of flight time. But he’s never had to make an emergency landing in a lake, and neither has his son Sam, his daughter Sarah, or his buddy Bill Foreman. They might want start thinking about such an eventuality, because their Air Farce One hang glider concept has been selected for Red Bull Flugtag Arizona.

As Chapman explains it, their inspiration was the media circus surrounding George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” appearance on that aircraft carrier back in – was it really this long ago? – 2003. “Everybody saw him land on the Independence, but no one saw him leave,” Chapman laughs. “We’re planning a parody so that people can finally see how everything went once the cameras were turned off.”

The whole presentation will be strictly nonpartisan, of course. Foreman, a family friend and pilot who hang glides with Chapman, will tackle the role of Dubya, while Chapman and Sam (a 16-year-old currently taking paragliding lessons with champion pilot Chris Santacroce) will be disguised as utterly ineffectual “terrorists.” And finally, Sarah, a student at the University of Utah, will test her acting chops as a fundamentalist tempted by the virility of the Commander in Chief.

Despite the craziness, there’s a certain wing nut on the team who’s hoping Air Farce One may actually fly. Chapman says, “Forget that water landing. We’re just going to thermal out of there.”

[The Air Farce One team consists of captain Dave Chapman, pilot Bill Foreman, and teammates Sarah Chapman and Sam Chapman. The Chapmans reside in Salt Lake City, Utah, while Foreman makes his home in Ruby Valley, Nevada.]

Oops, I forgot Dave bid the 75/76!

He's very tall. I wonder how in the hell he fit into an F-16!