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HB housed German Messerschmitt
by Robb Fulcher
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A look through the scrapbook of 77-year-old Hal Loomis recalls a time when a successful airplane part manufacturer set up shop on Pier Avenue, and Loomis was busy rebuilding a rare and ill-fated Luftwaffe sporting airplane down the hill on Hermosa Avenue.
The quirky World War II-era airplane, which had come into the possession of the prominent and aptly named aviation businessman George S. Wing, was made to fly by Loomis after a two-year rebuilding project in the mid-1950s. The plane, sporting a U.S. star on the tail where the swastika used to be, enjoyed a colorful test-flight history out of Torrance Municipal Airport, until it crashed to the ground.
Loomis, who is retired and living in Manhattan Beach, told the airplane’s tale on a foggy December morning fit for reminiscence, sitting over a cup of coffee at the Hermosa home of John Hales, a board member of the local historical society.
The speedy, low-wing Messerschmitt 108 was designed by the famed engineer of the same name in 1933, and became a personal utility craft, or “hack plane,” for officers of the German Luftwaffe. The plane’s successor, the Messerschmitt 109, became the Nazi squadrons’ prime fighter plane.
After the Allied forces defeated the Axis, two of the 108s were brought over to the U.S. to be studied. One of them wound up at a Los Angeles junkyard, and then was sold to Wing, the late president of the Hi-Shear Corporation, once based in Hermosa.
“Friends of George Wing found the plane and told George he ought to have it,” Loomis said. “George was an aviation enthusiast first class. He was a nut on the subject.”
Loomis was recruited to rebuild the airplane in an empty showroom of what is now the Bay Storage building on Hermosa Avenue at Ninth Street, with the help of a man named Modesto Tarado.
“For two years that was our main job,” Loomis said.
The engine, which had been sitting idle for years, was completely rebuilt. Then the craft was hauled out to the Torrance airport, where Hi-Shear had moved its headquarters.
“George flew it some and I flew it some. In my logbook I had 17 hours, and it was a total of 20. So George hardly flew it. He had several airplanes during this period,” Loomis said.
“It had good top speed for a plane at that time, and it had retractable landing gear, which was unusual. I thought it was a wonderful flying airplane. I found it straightforward, easy to fly,” Loomis said.
Some pilots described the 108 as difficult on the ground. It was prone to turning an accidental 360-degree donut, Loomis said..
Despite Loomis’ affection for the plane, his pure-science test flights were not without incident.
“One time I had the engine quit on me at 200 feet. On the north side of the airfield they had that garbanzo field, and I headed for that, then at about 50 feet I switched the [fuel] tanks and got the engine running again. It was basically a misunderstanding with the fuel system, and my cavalier attitude toward flying the plane,” Loomis said with a laugh.
“I was ready to jettison the canopy before I got the engine started. I could see the workers down there in the field, running out of the way,” he said.
Eight months after the plane arrived in Torrance, it saw its last day in the air. Wing took the craft up for a spin, ran out of fuel at about 100 feet, and headed down in the direction of Hawthorne Boulevard.
“They didn’t have all the buildings out there that they have now,” Loomis said. “It was countryside and fields back then.”
Wing
glided the plane toward the earth, snapping telephone wires, skidding across
a field and striking a three-foot tall irrigation dike, bringing the craft to
rest. Wing, then 40, suffered cuts and bruises. A passenger, the manager of
a small airport, was taken to Harbor General Hospital with non-life threatening
injuries including a dislocated left elbow.
Loomis offered his account of the crash with some reservation, perhaps because of the presence in the plane of Wing’s passenger. The airplane, after all, was designated “experimental” by the Federal Aviation Administration, restricting passengers from its cockpit, Loomis said.
The Messerschmitt was left with extensive damage including a broken fuselage and, with little hope of finding replacement parts. Wing sold the craft to the Ontario Air Museum.
“That was the end of it,” Loomis said. ER