Every day sleek U.S. navy F-14 tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets pierce the sky over Virginia Beach, home of Air Station Oceana. So dazzling are the jets that you might not notice one of their ancestors creeping along the horizon: a propeller-driven Spitfire, of the kind that defended England against the Luftwaffe during World War Ⅱ. The antique belongs to Gerald Yagen, chief executive of Tidewater Tech vocational schools, who collects World War Ⅱ warbirds in a hangar at nearby Suffolk Airport. Yagen loves these old geezers, though at 56 he's too young to remember the war and has never even served in the military. "It's the joy of being able to fly the aircraft," he explains, recalling a September afternoon in his TBM Avenger, the same type of torpedo dive-bomber former President George Bush was flying when he was shot down over the Pacific. Anybody can drive a Ferrari, he says, but "not everyone can land a Corsair on a narrow runway." The Virginia native started collecting World War Ⅱ aircraft in 1994, partly as a way to lure students into an aviation maintenance program at one of his 14 Tidewater Tech schools. A third of Yagen's 3,000 students take courses related to aviation.
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