The experts said she’d never fly again.

Rip It Up, Issue 145, 1 August 1989, Page 35

The experts said she’d never fly again.

I was riding shotgun on a log skidder in the foothills of Mount Kinabalu when I found her. There she was: a broken bird that had fallen from the sky half a century ago. I couldn’t figure out why she was in relatively good shape, with no sign of fire and no bullet holes. There was a story here. And I was determined to get to the bottom of it. The flared engine cowling meant I’d discovered an Aichi D3A2 carrier-

Y&R ALMSI96

But I ignored them.

based dive bomber dubbed the ‘Vai’ by Allied fliers (who for some reason gave Japanese -Vaircraft women’s / K names). Did the pilot w| HL i • walk away? c ■walkaway? . Was he the ; Japanese ace Satoshi ‘ . Anabuki? . Anabuki was the flier who received a citation for downing three B-24

bombers in one day (the last one by ramming its tail) then crash landing to safety himself. This was over 800 km from the nearest Japanese base, so maybe the Vai had run out of gas after a long dog fight with someone like American hotshot Gerry Johnson. If you met Johnson in the air and he didn’t recognise you, the best idea was to hide behind a cloud. A gungho Texan, Johnson shot down an Australian Boomerang fighter by mistake in ’43. The Boomerang was a write-off but the Aussie pilot managed to bail out unhurt. Johnson lay low for a few days and only re-emerged after cool heads in both camps prevailed upon him A < to mend Allied relations -— „ with a bottle of //y. JA\ Jim Beam. / sap W- i|ss The more I found " pl out about these crazy / guys the more I liked ■ them - ' I decided to restore ~ the Vai even if I had to hock my soul to do it. Now I might be handy with tools, but I’m not a real mechanic. Cowl Where would I get the parts? Who would help me with the work? Would they last the distance? I was sitting at the bar of my club in Kota Kinabalu one hot night asking myself these questions when the solution popped up next to me. Jim Beam and Coke please.’ She was a Filipina. Once she realised I wasn’t trying to pick her up, we got talking. Her name was Lena Reyes and she was a qualified mechanical engineer languishing as a t , Bwas a qualified mechanical engineer languishing as a - (jy A tally clerk in a timber yard. v In this part of the ft ***■»• world it is possible to stumble across ’ displaced doctors . ' driving bulldozers and immigrant teachers wrestling with chainsaws. . ; Turned out Lena’s parents had sheltered a US Marine I

during the Japanese occupation. . : / We hit it off. It took two long years but we restored that Vai rivet by z .* • * rivet, gasket by gasket. WM . X. 'l'**" , ■ < *k_ jRMB x *•* Lena X and I hadn’t h' / ei ”'' ' x ... fought a war, but we’d won a • ; battle of sorts getting the official nod, the parts and the backing to do what we did. These days Lena teaches at Caltech anl m on a project in N ? rthAfrica ' t)_ But we stay in touch. ‘Let me know if you find anything interesting jojjff in the desert’she W® W< wrote recently. ‘l’ve got two months leave owing, so I could fly A. over and take a look * sC\'' at it with you if that £jSk£l. x pX suits you.’ sof the Air f o id e( j Lena’s letter, fixed myself a Jim Beam on the rocks and sat back in my wicker chair on the - whitewashed terrace. ■> - . • - It got me wondering. ' . Was that twisted hunk of khakicoloured metal I spotted sticking out of f|||§i| a sandhill last week MMfcJ just rubbish, or was J“f - it part of a buried h | |) ■ ’ army jeep? . J I if