Vintage Aircraft Delight Fliers At Warsaw Airport
August 7, 2017 at 4:53 p.m.
By David [email protected]
“I saw it in the paper, Wednesday’s paper, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do on my birthday,” she said after getting off the 1929 New Standard D-25 with her husband, Larry. “So he said OK.”
She said it was exciting and a little bumpy at times.
Larry said it was “much better” than a commercial flight.
“One time I thought he was going to land and I thought, ‘This isn’t an airport,’ then he went back up again,” Sue said, calling the ride a “wonderful” birthday present.
“Yep, $75 was well worth it,” Larry said.
Along with the New Standard, the other plane available for rides Saturday was a 1943 North American T-6.
Rob Lock owns and pilots the New Standard, which also is known as a Waldo.
“There were a lot of Waldos back then, now there’s not so many of them,” he said, adding that there are only eight left.
Lock acquired his plane through a trade publication that used to come out called Trade A Plane. When he found his plane, the internet wasn’t a big thing yet.
“Back then, this publication would come out three times a month, and somebody in Oregon had advertised (the plane), and it hadn’t flown since the ’40s. It was just bits and pieces of it. Certainly, nothing close to airworthy, and (we) started the restoration on this one in ’96 and finished it in 2000, so it took 4-1/2 years to do,” Lock said.
He said it was nearly impossible to find parts so they had to be made.
“Back in the day when it was built originally, it was all hand built, and so no different now. You have to hand build everything. But the nice thing is, we still had the prints to it so we were able to use the original prints and build the parts we needed,” Lock said.
It took 5,000 hours of labor to rebuild it. At the time he wasn’t a mechanic so he had to pay about $40 an hour for a mechanic to work on it.
Lock is 6 feet, 9 inches so when he wanted to purchase a biplane, he wanted one he could fit in.
“I have another biplane called a Stearman, and I kind of fit in that, but I really don’t fit in it so well. But I really like this era of aviation. I didn’t really like the Warbirds. I like vintage, I like the ’20s and ’30s, the Roaring ’20s,” Lock said.
“So, the fact that it was so big was really appealing to me because I’m a big guy and I fit in it. I was hopeful I fit in it, because at the time I couldn’t sit in it because there really wasn’t much left to sit in it,” he said.
The D-25 holds the pilot in back and four passengers in the front. At first he didn’t care about the number of passengers it fit because he just wanted a big biplane, but the “commercial applicability of it, that’s why it was designed originally for rides. So we kind of went into the ride business and here we are today.”
Lock said the plane really flies well, especially for its age.
This is Waldow Wrights’ 18th year of offering rides in its planes. The flight company is based out of a museum in central Florida during the winter months. It has five biplanes that it operates. In the summer, a couple of them are brought up to the Air Zoo in Portage, Mich., and it does some small things like the airplane rides if the city isn’t too far away from Michigan.
More information on the D-25 is available online at www.waldowrights.com.
Erin Shuttleworth, owner/scheduler of Nostalgic Flights LLC, said the company is based out of Huntington and operates the T-6.
“The T-6 was the advance trainer for World War II, so everybody that went on to fly fighters, etc., had to do their time in a T-6,” Shuttleworth said.
When Nostalgic is out giving rides, she said they typically fly no higher than about 2,500 feet, depending on the weather.
“It’s wonderful. You have a great site out of it because you sit up high and you have a glass canopy and you can fly with it open. It’s just a thrill,” she said in explaining what a ride in it is like.
The flight company tends to stay in the Midwest. It starts its season in April and flies until the end of October.
“We do fly-ins, airshows, we barnstorm with Jill and Rob (Lock) with their New Standard, at least once a year,” Shuttleworth said.
Explaining what barnstorming is, she said, “We just show up in a small city. We advertise that we’re doing rides and then we do rides. It’s the way they used to do it in the golden era of aviation where they would land in a field, and you’d fly over the town, and people would come out and then you’d sell rides to them.”
Her husband John is the pilot for Nostalgic.
“Our T-6 we’ve had for a couple of years. We bought it from an estate sale in Ohio. But previous to that, my husband’s parents had a T-6, and he had the luxury of learning to fly that at the age of 16. That T-6, he flew for 17 years before his mom and dad sold it,” she said.
John’s parents were both pilots.
She said she and John had a Russian trainer for awhile, which John loved doing aerobatics in, but they couldn’t give rides because it was built overseas and considered “experimental.”
They purchased another T-6 to offer rides.
John also does rides in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and flies airshows in a AD-1 Skyraider, she said, “so we’re gone every weekend.”
“There’s only maybe 10 to 12 (B-17s) flying, so it’s been a real honor to do that, for the last seven or eight years we’ve been flying B-17s,” she said.
For more information on Nostalgic Flights, visit www.nostalgicflights.com.
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“I saw it in the paper, Wednesday’s paper, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to do on my birthday,” she said after getting off the 1929 New Standard D-25 with her husband, Larry. “So he said OK.”
She said it was exciting and a little bumpy at times.
Larry said it was “much better” than a commercial flight.
“One time I thought he was going to land and I thought, ‘This isn’t an airport,’ then he went back up again,” Sue said, calling the ride a “wonderful” birthday present.
“Yep, $75 was well worth it,” Larry said.
Along with the New Standard, the other plane available for rides Saturday was a 1943 North American T-6.
Rob Lock owns and pilots the New Standard, which also is known as a Waldo.
“There were a lot of Waldos back then, now there’s not so many of them,” he said, adding that there are only eight left.
Lock acquired his plane through a trade publication that used to come out called Trade A Plane. When he found his plane, the internet wasn’t a big thing yet.
“Back then, this publication would come out three times a month, and somebody in Oregon had advertised (the plane), and it hadn’t flown since the ’40s. It was just bits and pieces of it. Certainly, nothing close to airworthy, and (we) started the restoration on this one in ’96 and finished it in 2000, so it took 4-1/2 years to do,” Lock said.
He said it was nearly impossible to find parts so they had to be made.
“Back in the day when it was built originally, it was all hand built, and so no different now. You have to hand build everything. But the nice thing is, we still had the prints to it so we were able to use the original prints and build the parts we needed,” Lock said.
It took 5,000 hours of labor to rebuild it. At the time he wasn’t a mechanic so he had to pay about $40 an hour for a mechanic to work on it.
Lock is 6 feet, 9 inches so when he wanted to purchase a biplane, he wanted one he could fit in.
“I have another biplane called a Stearman, and I kind of fit in that, but I really don’t fit in it so well. But I really like this era of aviation. I didn’t really like the Warbirds. I like vintage, I like the ’20s and ’30s, the Roaring ’20s,” Lock said.
“So, the fact that it was so big was really appealing to me because I’m a big guy and I fit in it. I was hopeful I fit in it, because at the time I couldn’t sit in it because there really wasn’t much left to sit in it,” he said.
The D-25 holds the pilot in back and four passengers in the front. At first he didn’t care about the number of passengers it fit because he just wanted a big biplane, but the “commercial applicability of it, that’s why it was designed originally for rides. So we kind of went into the ride business and here we are today.”
Lock said the plane really flies well, especially for its age.
This is Waldow Wrights’ 18th year of offering rides in its planes. The flight company is based out of a museum in central Florida during the winter months. It has five biplanes that it operates. In the summer, a couple of them are brought up to the Air Zoo in Portage, Mich., and it does some small things like the airplane rides if the city isn’t too far away from Michigan.
More information on the D-25 is available online at www.waldowrights.com.
Erin Shuttleworth, owner/scheduler of Nostalgic Flights LLC, said the company is based out of Huntington and operates the T-6.
“The T-6 was the advance trainer for World War II, so everybody that went on to fly fighters, etc., had to do their time in a T-6,” Shuttleworth said.
When Nostalgic is out giving rides, she said they typically fly no higher than about 2,500 feet, depending on the weather.
“It’s wonderful. You have a great site out of it because you sit up high and you have a glass canopy and you can fly with it open. It’s just a thrill,” she said in explaining what a ride in it is like.
The flight company tends to stay in the Midwest. It starts its season in April and flies until the end of October.
“We do fly-ins, airshows, we barnstorm with Jill and Rob (Lock) with their New Standard, at least once a year,” Shuttleworth said.
Explaining what barnstorming is, she said, “We just show up in a small city. We advertise that we’re doing rides and then we do rides. It’s the way they used to do it in the golden era of aviation where they would land in a field, and you’d fly over the town, and people would come out and then you’d sell rides to them.”
Her husband John is the pilot for Nostalgic.
“Our T-6 we’ve had for a couple of years. We bought it from an estate sale in Ohio. But previous to that, my husband’s parents had a T-6, and he had the luxury of learning to fly that at the age of 16. That T-6, he flew for 17 years before his mom and dad sold it,” she said.
John’s parents were both pilots.
She said she and John had a Russian trainer for awhile, which John loved doing aerobatics in, but they couldn’t give rides because it was built overseas and considered “experimental.”
They purchased another T-6 to offer rides.
John also does rides in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and flies airshows in a AD-1 Skyraider, she said, “so we’re gone every weekend.”
“There’s only maybe 10 to 12 (B-17s) flying, so it’s been a real honor to do that, for the last seven or eight years we’ve been flying B-17s,” she said.
For more information on Nostalgic Flights, visit www.nostalgicflights.com.
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