Field Notes

In the late 1930s, while Europe became embroiled in another war, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold sat at the head of the United States Army Air Corps and did the math.

When you restore an old airplane, you spend a lot of time with the paperwork. FAA registration files, bills of sale, airworthiness certificates, repair logs, affidavits from long-dead mechanics.

A friend wrote me last week.

Every museum is really about people. Ours happens to be full of airplanes — beautiful ones, old ones, machines that still fly and still make your heart rate climb when they light up a radial engine on a Saturday morning.

I get asked a version of the same question at least once a week. Usually it comes from someone standing in the hangar, looking at the Wacos, and it goes something like this: "So why Oklahoma?

The United States is not short on aviation museums. Nearly 350 of them are scattered across the fifty states.

I ask it on every tour I give. I wait a beat and watch people’s faces.

In 2010, my friends Les Banta, John Hazelton, and I went to Sun' N Fun. It was the first visit there for me and was a bit mind-blowing.

My first Waco, a UMF 3, was restored by the amazing craftsman Dave Allen from Coronado, California. I've written about him here before.

If I go back to the beginning of all of this, I just wanted to be able to put one airplane with big wheels on grass...

The new Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field purchased another airplane this week, a "Rhinehart- Rose" named "Easter Rose" as it first flew on Easter Day in 1972 (all Parrakeets are named after some kind of "Rose" in honor of its designer Jack Rose). This is a pretty little airplane.

In 1941 Clarence Page and a group of Oklahoma City businessmen bought land west of town and created a flying field for the Army Air Corps called “Cimarron Field”.  Business was so brisk training pilots for the World War II effort that they needed to expand.

I remember when I was just getting back into aviation and telling my wife, "If I could just find a nice Piper Dakota...", it would be all the airplane I ever needed.  That turned out to be dramatically wrong, as my family loves to mirthfully remind me.

I think every pilot, even those who fly modern flat-engine airplanes, knows that radial engines make a mess.  Mostly that's noticed on the hangar floor, and every radial owner has their way of trapping their engines' drips and drops.

The brainchild of Reuben Fleet who designed it while an executive at Consolidated Aircraft, (builder of the famous PBY flying boat and with a fascinating corporate history itself) the Fleet Model 1 was designed and built to attempt to bridge the company’s sales into the civilian market.

Recently, I wrote an article about some things I think antique airplane buyers ought to consider when setting a price and selling a plane.

For one week every year, Wittman Regional Airport (KOSH) is said to become the busiest airport in the world. Having flown in there a number of times now, both VFR and IFR, I can attest that it's busy.

People who love old airplanes, old cars, houses, or other tangible reminders of the past are often dreamers who conjure images in their imaginations of a time simpler, more beautiful, or perhaps just more interesting than the present.