Man & Machine
After 51 years, Wilmingtonian Hampton Tillery is reunited with Pumpkin Pie
WILMINGTON
native, Hampton
Tillery Jr. joined
the U.S. Air Force in 1968.
After earning his pilot’s
wings, he deployed to
Nakhon Phanom Royal
Thai Air Force Base in
Thailand in 1970 at the
height of the Vietnam War.
The initial disappointment
about his assignment to
an A-1H Skyraider — a
piston-powered, propeller-
driven single-seat attack
aircraft — rather than a
faster, higher-flying fighter
soon vanished.
“Every day, whether flying
close-air support for our
ground-based troops or for
special operations missions,
we could see what we accom-plished,”
he said. “Flying a
Photos Courtesy of the Tillery Family
BY RONA SIMMONS
Half a century from the day when Lt. Hampton
Tillery stepped from the cockpit of Pumpkin Pie,
his A-1H Skyraider, in Southeast Asia, he was
back. On July 21, 2021, Tillery settled into the very
same cockpit, although this time the Skyraider
was on the tarmac of the Tennessee Museum of
Aviation in Sevierville, 9,000 miles from Vietnam.
How man and machine were reunited is a story
of incredible odds, bravery, and patriotism.
Skyraider was exactly where
I wanted to be.”
At the end of his tour of duty 10 months later, he had flown
177 missions. He returned home and, like so many service
members, picked up where he left off, completing his education
with a degree in accounting from the University of North
Carolina. Later, he joined a family-owned business in
Wilmington, Atlantic Appliance and Hardware, founded in
1948 by his father, Hampton Tillery Sr., Gene Edwards and
Harry Stovall Sr. Successive Tillery and Edwards generations
still operate the Wilmington business.
30 november 2021
WBM
While Tillery carried on
with his life after Vietnam,
Pumpkin Pie – named after
a term of endearment for his
wife — sat abandoned on a
runway in Thailand.
Skyraiders first saw
service in the Korean War.
Twenty years later, during
the Vietnam War, the highly
durable aircraft were flown
over Vietnam, Laos, and
the Ho Chi Minh Trail for
interdiction and close air
support of ground forces as
well as other highly sensitive
missions. They were perfect
for the job — able to remain
at low altitude and stay over a
target longer than most other
aircraft.
By 1973 the aging A-1 was
phased out with all remain-ing
planes turned over to
the South Vietnamese Air
Force. As the end of the war
approached and defeat loomed, the South Vietnamese destroyed
most of them.
The story of 11 Skyraiders among the more than 100 U.S. and
foreign aircraft flown out of Vietnam to the U-Tapao Royal Thai
Navy Airfield in Thailand is detailed in an article published in the
December/January 1997 issue of Air & Space Magazine.
Brig. Gen. Henry Aderholt, chief advisor to the Royal Air
Force in Thailand, worried about the planes falling into enemy
hands and becoming a threat to Vietnam’s militarily weaker