Week 29: The Acrojets
During World War II, the nearby Williams Air Force Base churned out thousands of pilots trained to fly twin and four engine airplanes, mostly bombers. After the war ended, many of the pilot training bases closed but not Williams. Williams was converted to jet pilot training, and became the first jet fighter training school in the country when it received P-80 Shooting Stars in 1945.
Three years later, a group of pilots at Williams formed the Air Force’s first precision jet flying team. Known as the Acrojets, the group peformed feats of aerial acrobatics in F-80s. They performed for the first time at the 1948 pilot training graduation ceremony. The original members of the Acrojets were Captain Howard W. Jensen, Lieutenant Michael Smolen, Captain Benjamin F. Yearger, Jr., and Captain Walter K. Selenger. Captain Robert C. Tomlinson was the alternate who could step in and fly any of the four positions in the formation at a moment’s notice.
The group represeted the first team of pilots to perfect such daring and precise formations at high rates of speed, sometimes surpassing 600 miles per hour. They were famous for their skill at flying in extremely tight formation. It was said that the wingmen flew three feet apart - so close to the leader that they could read the instruments on the lead pilot’s display. Their routine included taking off and landing in formation, rolls that put them completely upside down as they flew low to the ground past awestruck audiences, clover leafs, and a maneuver called the “bombshell.” The bombshell involved accelerating to extremely high rates of speed and then going straight up in the air 8,000 feet. When they reached the pinnacle they separated, with each plane zooming off in a different direction. The Acrojets were the first to perform this maneuver, which was later adopted by the Thunderbirds.
The Acrojets were not just a diversion for the pilots to get out of their training regimine. Colonel Robert L. Scott, Wing Commander of the fighter school at Williams, said “Acrobatics are not something which should be thought of as only thrilling, but rather as an integral part of training of every fighter pilot.” The team was recognized as an official unit of the Air Force in 1949.
They spent the next two years touring the country performing in air shows and at air races before four of the pilots were reassigned to duty in Korea. Lt. Smolen remained to recruit and train a new batch of Acrojet pilots. That same year, 1951, the movie “Air Cadet” was filmed at Williams, with members of the Acrojets performing most of the maneuvers seen in the film.
The Acrojets continued to perform until 1953, when the unit was disbanded. Lt. Smolen created a new Acrojets team in 1955, based in Fuerstenfeldbruck Air Base in Germany. The new Acrojets performed many of the same maneuvers as the original group, this time flying the T-33 Thunderbird. The new Acrojets were disbanded in 1957.
Though the history of the Acrojets was short, their impact was immense. Their aerial acrobatics and precision flying showed what jets could do and served as a recruitment tool to get people to join the Air Force. Acrojets paved the way for other precision flight teams like the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels, and their legacy lived on in film and their name was revived for a video game on Commodore-64 called “Acrojet,” which was a flight simulator game.