Into the Blue! : Marine Air Show, Ground Exhibits Thrill 230,000 in El Toro

A Korean War-era MIG-15, courtesy of the People’s Republic of China, was buzzing and looping overhead, but U.S. Marine Cpl. Dale Bauermeister, Stinger anti-aircraft missile launcher in hand, was oblivious to this particular enemy jet.

That was lucky for the MIG pilot--in this case Paul Entrekin, a former Marine aviator--because Bauermeister left little doubt that he could have blown it out of the air if he had wanted to.

“I can identify 185 different aircraft by sight, you just show me an outline of the plane,” said the strapping Marine from Camp Pendleton. He spoke with the self-assuredness of a carnival huckster and sported a tattoo of the Marine Corps motto, Semper Fidelis, on his muscular left arm. He was drawing a crowd, and his delivery was up to it.

‘Disbelieve in Human Error’

“I’ve fired this live in the field, and all I felt was weight loss and a little tap on the shoulder. I’ve trained 2 months in Honduras. I’ve got an 87% kill ratio with this. The other 13% is electronic malfunction or human error, and I totally disbelieve in human error.”

There was certainly no room for it Saturday in the air over El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, where pilots in an eclectic array of aircraft dazzled a crowd of about 230,000 with loops, rolls, roaring ascents straight into the brilliant sun and silent, earthward spins.

But there was a lot more to the 39th annual Navy Relief Air Show than just airplanes, although they were the featured attraction. There were tanks, trucks and amphibious troop transporters for kids to climb around on. There was Bauermeister and his Stinger--”The Afghan rebels chased the Russians out with these, you know,” he said. There were radar installations, machine guns and helicopters. All were laid out on the air base’s runways, which were overrun by people on foot, bicycle, skateboard, stroller and even a few little red wagons Saturday.

Marine officials hope to raise $500,000 for needy sailors and Marines from concession sales at the weekend air show, and there was no shortage of merchandise Saturday. You could buy Blue Angel visors and coloring books honoring the Navy precision-flying team. Or an F-14 Tomcat baseball hat. Or posters, pins, patches, pennants, postcards and plastic replicas of just about any fighter aircraft imaginable.

And then there were the Marine-for-a-moment concession booths.

“Hey, look this way!” yelled Angel Rivas to his 12-year-old son, Angel Jr., who had climbed up on a truck bed to pose behind an M2 machine gun, mounted on a tripod behind a stack of sandbags. A Marine snapped the boy’s picture, and the next kid in line clambered up to the gun.

“The kids want to see this,” said Rivas, of Santa Ana, who also brought his 8-year-old, Alejandro. “I brought them 2 years ago, and they wanted to see it again.”

And what does Angel Jr. like best at the show?

“The guns,” he said without hesitation. “And the spy planes.”

At another booth, Marines patiently painted brown and green camouflage on kids’ faces, who, for $2.50, could then don a flak jacket and helmet, sling an M-60 machine gun over their shoulder and, posing as junior Rambos, have their Polaroids taken.

One who had his face “cammied” was 4-year-old Alex Mason of San Clemente. Alex clapped and smiled beneath the paint with each pass of the roaring F/A-18s above.

“His favorite movie’s ‘Top Gun,’ ” said his father, Bill Mason. “We were here last year--in fact, I had the F-18 that crashed on videotape.”

That crash came near the end of the show, on a loop maneuver by Marine Col. Jerry Cadick. Cadick was critically injured in the crash, but he survived.

Unlike last year, or 1985, when a World War II-vintage plane crashed in front of 200,000 spectators, killing the pilot and passenger, there were no incidents Saturday.

There were, however, the usual traffic jams, compounded this weekend by an evening Grateful Dead concert at the nearby Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

The California Highway Patrol said most of the congestion from the air show had cleared by the time concert-goers got stuck in their own traffic jam on the southbound San Diego Freeway about 7:30 p.m. The congestion was compounded by an earlier accident near San Juan Capistrano involving a motorcycle, officers said.