Jet Plane Owner Witnesses Reno Air Tragedy

The Reno National Air Championship Air Races and Air Show was going to be the second year in a row for jet plane owner Raju Grace Mann to race her AirRace21 business venture entry into the wild blue yonder.
Instead, the Indian American resident of Orinda, Calif., was numbed and shocked Sept. 16 by the horrific crash of a vintage World War II P-51 airplane into a crowd of spectators at the world-famous air show.
The crash has claimed 11 lives to date, including the 74-year-old veteran pilot Jimmy Leeward. More than 50 spectators were injured, including some still in hospitals in serious condition.
Mann, who was adopted at the age of about five from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Kolkata by the son of German 1929 Nobel Prize winner for literature Thomas Mann , had been interviewed before the week-long air races began for an India-West profile.
All that remained was to update how Mann’s plane, which she rented and was being flown by Heather Penney, one of the only women fliers in the air show, had pe rformed. Mann herself is not a pilot.
The tragic crash cancelled the rest of this year’s Reno air show, left the event’s future in doubt and changed this profile’s direction.
Mann told India-West in a phone call from Reno Sept. 19, as she got ready to return to her Orinda home, that she was “only about 200 yards from the crash,” and had stepped into a trailer near her plane’s pit area when she heard a loud noise and people screaming.
She and the other members of her air racing business, AirRace21, thought initially it was a blown engine or a crash in the desert, but when she heard “two, three, four, five ambulance sirens,” she said she knew it was much more serious. “It was unbelievably shocking,” she said.
Mann’s plane created controversy last year among the somewhat-staid establishment at the Reno Air Show because of its flamboyant India-themed design on the side of the plane. It displays what she feels is a tasteful, but somewhat graphic, image of Mann.
Mann was abandoned as a newborn on the front steps of Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Kolkata. She doesn’t know the date of her birth, but according to biographical materials provided by her publicist, she celebrates it on Oct. 13 and is 46 or 47.
Thomas Mann, the 1929 Nobel Prize winner and author of such classic novels as “Death in Venice,” and “Magic Mountain,” died on Aug. 12, 1955.
Mann said she returned to the orphanage recently and was told that records showed she was born in Madhya Pradesh.
When she was about four years old, an age when hope dims for many orphans, she was adopted by Thomas Mann’s youngest son, Michael Thomas Mann, a German-born musician and professor of German literature; and Swiss-born Gret Moser, who had earlier married Mann in New York. One of her favorite books, said Mann, is her grandfather’s “Death in Venice.”
22/09/11 Richard Springer/India West.com

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Categories: Foreign Sep 2011, Safety Sep 2011