An incredible, centurylong story of twin Georgia boys who became Air Force generals and founding members of the USAF Thunderbirds closes this week when they and their wives receive a rare double inurnment at Arlington National Cemetery.
The Wednesday ceremony for retired Lt. Gen. Charles “Buck” Pattillo and Maj. Gen. Cuthbert “Bill” Pattillo and their wives Bobbie and Joyce will feature a flyover by the Thunderbirds and attendance by top Air Force brass, including chief of staff Gen. Charles Brown.
Bill Pattillo died in 2014, Buck in 2019. Having done virtually everything together throughout their life, the Pattillo twins planned to spend their afterlife side by side and decided to hold off entering Arlington until they and their wives died.
“It was always their dream to be buried side by side,” said Scott Pattillo, Buck’s son, also a retired Air Force fighter pilot.
Among the twins’ memorable achievements was being two of the founding members of the Thunderbirds, the Air Force aerobatic flight team. It was an offshoot of an earlier team they started, the “Skyblazers,” in 1949.
Scott Pattillo told us that the twins’ aviation tricks began early in their career, when they would fly low over the airfield to pump up their ground crews. “Pretty soon, everybody started to expect it,” he said of the origins of the Skyblazers.
As Thunderbirds in 1953 and 1954, they flew left- and right-wing positions and helped develop many of the maneuvers still performed today, including the famous “Bomb Burst” finale. They both flew with Chuck Yeager during the Thunderbirds’ first international trip and appeared together on magazine covers and on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Throughout their military career, they were on parallel tracks, and, even in retirement, they lived near each other in central Virginia.
Bringing in the Thunderbirds from Nevada is extremely rare, and a hat tip to both the importance of the twins’ legacy and the 75th anniversary of the Air Force.
