CAMARILLO : Vintage Bearcat Has a Smooth Landing

“Light as a feather.”

That was pilot Marvin (Lefty) Gardner’s assessment of the F8F Bearcat, a vintage Navy fighter that he flew through the clouds into Camarillo Airport on Sunday.

The silver, single-seat Bearcat, which saw action in the South Pacific toward the end of World War II, will be refurbished and put on display at the airport by the Southern California wing of the Confederate Air Force.

Sunday’s brief flight marked the plane’s official transfer to the aviation group, which has about 8,000 former veterans worldwide.

Gardner, 70, flew the plane for about 20 minutes from Chino, where restoration had begun. Only a few of the planes have survived, he said, adding that the Bearcat’s maximum speed of 540 m.p.h. made it “the fastest and best-handling World War II prop fighter.”

Gardner, a resident of Austin, Tex., knows his aircraft. He flew B-17s and B-24s on 46 missions over Europe. Some of them, he said, were covert flights into neutral Sweden with cargoes for the underground in neighboring Nazi-controlled Norway.

On Sunday, Gardner said he pushed the plane to only about 300 m.p.h. because the Bearcat had been out of service for eight years and “still needs engine work.”

Even so, he said he could feel the excitement of flying it as he climbed to 4,500 feet.

“All you have to do is think about a maneuver and it’s there,” Gardner said.

Escorting the Bearcat into the airport were three other World War II-vintage planes--a P-51 Mustang, a C-46 Curtiss Commando and a SNJ-5 trainer.