Aircraft registration numbers are kind of like license plates. While the vast majority of N-numbers are randomly assigned, an airplane owner can request a specific number for the whopping fee of $10. Some personalized registrations are relatively easy to identify and translate, while others are a bit more cryptic.
Such is the case with N273CB.
“Three Charlie Bravo” is a 1953 model Beech T-34A, currently owned by Tim Gause, of Rock Hill, South Carolina.
“I think of myself as a fortunate custodian of a precious national treasure that I bought from General Charles Boyd,” said Gause, a retired military and airline pilot. “General Boyd was the only Vietnam War combat pilot who became a prisoner of war and later achieved the rank of four-star general in the U.S. Air Force. Boyd spent nearly seven years as a POW in North Vietnam after his F-105 Thunderchief was shot down in 1966. He was released in February 1973 as part of Operation Homecoming, 02/73, hence the origin of N273CB.”
If it wasn’t for the effort that Gause invests in honoring its previous owner, N273CB could easily be any garden-variety T-34A. This one was built for the U.S. Air Force and assigned the serial number 53-3311. After spending four years as a primary trainer for the Air Force, it transitioned to civilian life. It was issued a certificate of airworthiness for N311H (A45, G-72) and transferred to the Offutt Air Force Base Aeroclub on June 28, 1957. After almost three years in Nebraska, N311H was transferred to the Laughlin AFB Aeroclub and, a year later, to the Aeroclub at Barksdale AFB. Finally, the T-34 entered service with the Civil Air Patrol at Maxwell AFB in July 1964.
G-72 entered full civilian life in September 1974, when it was bought by Frank Sanders for a whopping $9,760. Sanders held onto the T-34 for 12 years then sold it for a nice profit of $60,000. The Mentor was later owned by several different caretakers before Boyd purchased the aircraft in 2011. This is where N311H transformed into N273CB.
Charles Graham ‘Chuck’ Boyd
When Curtes sold his T-34 to Boyd, he did not realize that he was selling the airplane to an American hero and military legend. The life of Chuck Boyd could fill a large novel, so here are the basics.
Boyd was born in Rockwell City, Iowa, on April 15, 1938. By the time he was about 11 years old, in 1949, he was helping to run a dairy and multicrop agricultural enterprise. At some point, Boyd became fascinated with airplanes. His first flight was in a Piper Cub at age 7. From that moment on, his single, undeviating dream was to fly airplanes of any kind. Later, he narrowed his focus to fighters for the Air Force.
Upon graduating from pilot training and receiving his commission, Boyd was stationed at Luke AFB in Phoenix for six months of fighter training, followed by three months at Nellis AFB in Nevada, for what they called top-off training. Finally, he had to endure three months of survival school. Then he was off to his first operational assignment during the Vietnam War at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. He flew his original “dream fighter,” the North American F-100 until 1964, then transitioned to the Republic F-105, a supersonic fighter bomber, affectionately known as “The Thud.”
“The general said that he was not an extraordinary pilot, although a listing of his awards and ribbons might contradict his opinion,” said Billy “Smitty” Smith, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, current president of the T-34 Association, and friend of Boyd’s. “Nevertheless, he flew 105 missions over enemy territory in F-105s. On one mission in mid-February 1966, he was forced to bail out over enemy territory when his gun exploded, destroying the Thud’s engine. He was quickly rescued by helicopter. At his insistence, he was back flying the following day.”
On April 22, 1966, Boyd was shot down while flying an “Iron Hand” mission, designed to track down the surface-to-air missile systems that were defending the western part of Hanoi while a strike flight came in from the west. Boyd spent the next seven years as a prisoner in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” enduring torture, brutal interrogation, solitary confinement, malnutrition, and illness. He kept his mind by, incredibly, learning Spanish from a fellow POW through the use of “tap code.” He was later awarded the Air Force Cross, which is second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Following the Paris Peace Accords, signed on January 27, 1973, Boyd returned home in February 1973.
“During his post-captivity physical exam, he learned that his vision had been damaged from malnutrition, which meant he was taken off flight status,” said Smith. “At that point, he felt, ‘Well, if I can’t fly, I don’t have a future in the Air Force, without a college degree, and uncertain visual problems.’ So, he was just going to go back to Iowa and be a farmer. The Air Force, however, had other ideas. Somebody obviously recognized his potential and made him an offer he could not refuse. They offered him an opportunity to go back to college to get a degree, at government expense. Chuck has said ‘the advice they gave me, and the gentle shove, led to a career which would simply not have been possible otherwise.’ From that point forward, the guy who had been a lackadaisical student became a strong advocate for education. Interestingly, later in his career [1990–92], he became the commander of the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base. In this capacity, he was able to have a lasting effect on education in the military.”
Boyd went on to carve out a distinguished military career, eventually becoming deputy commander in chief of U.S. European Command and earning four stars, becoming the only American to emerge from the Hanoi Hilton and go on to become a four-star general. He also used a loophole in the system that required a general officer to have another pilot in the plane. In this manner, he was able to regain his flying status when he received his first star. He was later given the Gray Eagle award by being the most senior active-duty pilot in the Air Force.
Boyd retired from the Air Force in 1995 but remained active in a variety of activities and organizations. This included flying as a civilian, but he was rather particular about the airplanes he flew.
“The general had tried his hand at civilian flying after his retirement from the USAF but struggled to find the perfect airplane,” said Smith. “Finally, in 2011, he bought the back half of his ‘bookend’ from Don Curtes, T-34A, MSN G-72. And that is when I met the general. The insurance company required that he have a certain number of flight hours of dual time with an approved instructor. I was asked to be that instructor and that was the beginning of a wonderful 10-year friendship. He loved that T-34 and all he wanted to do was fly, fly, fly.”
Smith says that Boyd felt one of his greatest contributions to the Air Force was by creating a new sense of importance surrounding education.
“It was his lack of education that almost prevented him from becoming an Air Force pilot, and it was the educational opportunities presented to him once he returned home from Vietnam that contributed to him being able to make a lasting impact on the Air Force,” he said of Boyd, who died on March 23, 2022, at the age of 83.
N273CB Today
Gause, 66, is now the proud custodian, as he calls himself, of Three Charlie Bravo. He says that many of the good things that have happened in his life occurred because he was in the right place at the right time.
“When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I saw the USAF Thunderbirds flying their North American F-100s at McEntire Air National Guard Base, and I was captivated—hook, line, and sinker,” Gause said. “Later, I used to cut class to go out to Shaw AFB to watch the McDonnell F-4 Phantoms tear up the pattern day after day. They were incredibly noisy, and belched a lot of black smoke, and they just captivated me. From that point on, all I wanted to do was be an Air Force pilot.”
Gause achieved that goal, barely, after a long and winding road.
“I actually enlisted in the Navy as soon as I graduated high school, with the singular goal of becoming a pilot,” he said. “When it came to the flight physical, however, it turned out that I had a form of color blindness. With that, I set aside my long-term goals and decided to get a bachelor’s degree instead. Once I graduated, I started talking to an Air Force recruiter. I told him about my whole background with the color vision thing. [They] sent me to Shaw Air Force Base to get a flight physical, which I passed, even the color blindness test.”
Gause’s first posting as a freshly minted second lieutenant was to Hanscom AFB in Massachusetts. In what he calls a stroke of divine intervention, he was presented with another opportunity to apply for flight school and this time passed. Thus began a flying career in the Air Force. After flight training, he flew both the Boeing B-52 and KC-10. Ironically, his last flying assignment was teaching on the T-34 in Pensacola, Florida. Altogether, he spent 13 years active duty, three years of inactive reserve, and 14 years in the North Carolina Air National Guard, allowing Gause to retire as a lieutenant colonel.
In 1997, his flying days in the Air Force were nearing their end, so Gause started applying to airlines. He was quickly picked up by Northwest Airlines, later Delta Air Lines, and took an early retirement in 2020, after flying the Airbus A350. He first learned about Boyd’s T-34 through a friend of his, Tom Tousignant, who purchased a Great Lakes from the general several years earlier. At the time, Gause owned a beautifully restored Cessna L-19 Bird Dog.
“To be honest I really wasn’t considering another airplane at the time,” Gause said. “But then Tom came back from the general’s home and excitedly told me about the T-34 sitting in his hangar in Warrenton, Virginia. It was drop-dead gorgeous. The only problem was that the T-34 was not for sale.”
Fast-forward to late fall 2021.
“One afternoon, I got a call from a friend, telling me that General Boyd’s T-34 had just gone on the market,” he said. “I immediately called him to throw my name in the hat. I went back up to Warrenton and had a long talk with the general. I was already forming a plan in my head as to how I wanted to use his airplane. I told him I wanted to keep his plane just as it was, and I wanted to use this as a showcase of his service, and that era of our history, in general. I asked if I could keep the plane in its existing N-number and color scheme. He replied in the affirmative with two conditions. He made me promise to remove the Gray Eagle sticker which, of course, I did…He also wanted me to maintain the personalized registration, which I absolutely will.
“After about a two-hour screening, I was pleased to learn that I had indeed passed the interview when he went to his storage locker and handed me the logbooks with nothing more than a handshake.”
Since then, Gause has thrown himself into his mission to show off his beautiful T-34 and tell the story of Boyd’s life and career, including time spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp. He has put together a website dedicated to his memory (www.tylege-aviation.com), with links to some of the general’s interviews and videos of him flying the airplane, along with a collection of pictures and a recommended list of books written by other POWs from that era.
The other aspect of Gause’s mission is to take N273CB to as many airshows as possible and share Boyd’s incredible life story.
“I find that most young people I talk to have only a vague idea of the Vietnam era and the conflict our country went through in general and, more specifically, the stories of the 766 U.S. servicemen held captive by the North Vietnamese and what they collectively endured over the course of their internment,” he said. “General Boyd never authored a book chronicling his time spent as a POW. He liked to say he would prefer to always look forward and not dwell on what happened in the past. He didn’t do many interviews on the subject. However, he did do one particular interview which is only about two and a half minutes long. This is a moving and poignant segment that encapsulates his feelings on his time spent in the Hanoi Hilton. It is entitled ‘Forever an Airman.” In the three years since he has owned Three Charlie Bravo, Gause has attended several major airshows, as well as quite a few other local aviation-related events and regional fly-ins.
“The T-34 always attracts a crowd, which then allows me to tell the story to as many people who are willing to listen,” he said. “I’m usually a one-man show and standing by the airplane for eight-10 hours, which is physically demanding. Doing a two-to-three-day airshow can be challenging, and I usually can’t talk for a few days following the show. Yet, I consider myself one of the most fortunate guys around. Not only do I get to talk about the airplane, but because it attracts so many people, I can easily start the conversation about General Boyd’s incredible story.”
Gause looks forward to many more years of keeping the memory of General Charles Boyd and his tremendous accomplishments alive at airshows around the country.
