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Déjà vu All Over Again
By Steve Weaver
Without question, the U.S. aviation fleet is growing long in tooth. While new aircraft are being built, their numbers are infinitesimally small when compared to the huge number of aircraft the industry pumped out in the 60s, 70s and very early 80s. The bulk of those earlier aircraft still exist, most of them on U.S. registry and the average age of registered aircraft goes up yearly. Today, those old aircraft actually make up the largest percentage of the aircraft population in our country.
Yet it seems like I’m always taken by surprise when I run into an airplane that I’ve known from the past, and especially if it’s from a much earlier time in my life.
Sometimes it’s a familiar registration number that sparks recognition, and other times an examination of the logs reveals an event that I remember. Once in a while I even come across my own name in the aircraft log books, a younger me signing off an item of maintenance.
Early Adventures In My Luscombe 8A, Part Three
By Steve Weaver
Continued from the January 2012 Issue
By the time I reached Pennsboro the ground was totally dark and now I was following the lights of moving cars that I fervently hoped were moving toward Parkersburg. Worse, I had no lights on the airplane and nothing to light the instrument panel, which at this point was a just a dark shape in front of my knees. I had never been in an airplane at night before, and as the visual cues that I had used in flying, without even thinking about them, slipped away one by one, I felt like a man being swept by swift waters to a waiting waterfall. The brassy taste of fear was in my mouth.
The speed of the little airplane over the ground now seemed reduced to a snail’s pace, and the indistinct gloaming below passed ever so slowly. The sky, still with faint afterglow on the western horizon, had darkened above me and stars were beginning to appear. I kept trying to comprehend the fact that I was flying an airplane alone, through a night sky.
Early Adventure In My Luscombe 8A
By Steve Weaver
The early summer twilight was fading by the minute. Darkness was descending like a cloak on the rugged West Virginia landscape that was slipping by a thousand feet below the dangling wheels of the white Luscombe I was flying.
I felt the first stirrings of panic rising in my chest as the seriousness of my situation dawned on me and I stared frantically down at the lights of cars moving on the now invisible roads below. Inside them I knew were ordinary people, safely making their way home along familiar highways, following the bright beams of their headlights to the warmth of family and the comforts of hearth and supper. I wanted to be with them. I wanted out of this devil machine that was carrying me to my apparent doom. I wanted my mom.
It was June of 1962. The week before I had not only soloed the Piper Colt trainer at the old airpark where I was learning to fly, I’d bought a perky little Luscombe 8A the following day and checked out in it too. At that point I’d logged about nine total hours in the air, I’d soloed two machines and made one of them mine. My flying career was right on track.
Tips From the Pros - December 2011
Aviators Helping Aviators
By Doug Combs
The Luscombe Endowment, Inc.
Those of us who own airplanes and fly them for recreation find the fleet is generally 30 to 70 years old. Few mechanics nowadays are familiar with these old birds, and many shops will turn away maintenance on these vintage airplanes unless that owner can provide the mechanic with reasonable technical data or parts support. This is where we find aviators helping aviators through organizations called “Type Clubs.”
Type clubs usually offer newsletters and shared owner/mechanic technical expertise. They often have rare or lost manuals needed for maintenance, or they have a tribal knowledge of problem areas in different “types” of vintage airplanes. Some have websites and blogs where one can access help in a timely fashion. A thorough listing of such organizations can be found at http://www.vintageaircraft.org/type/index.html.
The Luscombe Silvaire Survives for 74 Years With a Life of its Own
By Alan Smith
A 1928 Velie Monocoupe by Clayton Folkerts and Don Luscomb. (Jeremy Drey)We all know the famous names that mark the history of the light plane industry. Most of them, like Bill Piper, Clyde Cessna, or Walter Beech are names that are still with us today along with the aircraft being produced by the companies they started.
Then, there is Donald A. Luscombe who really started the idea of the private light plane back in 1927 when, with Iowa farmer Clayton Folkerts, he designed the Monocoupe – the first enclosed cabin, two-seat, high-wing monoplane to be offered to the public. Folkerts built the first prototype and Luscombe teamed up with industrialist W.L. Velie, who had previously manufactured automobiles to build the model 70 Monocoupe from 1927 through 1929 and offer it as “The Ultimate Plane for the Private Flier.” 350 were built and sold, and Don Luscombe was on his way.
How Bill Piper and His Piper Cub Taught America How to Fly
By Alan Smith
We all know that a number of men played a significant role in the development of the private aircraft. We know about Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech, Don Luscombe and others, but only one really made a personal plane affordable to the masses. That was William T/ Piper of Bradford, Pennsylvania where he worked in his father’s oil business. He was well into middle age before he found himself moving into the airplane business and did not learn to fly until he was 60 years old.
Early in the century, shortly after the Wright Brothers had proved the powered airplane possible at Kitty Hawk North Carolina on December 17, 1903, Piper had been in the military, had been involved in the Spanish American War, and had earned a Harvard degree in mechanical engineering. He set out to get into the industrial construction business, but soon lost interest in that and returned to Bradford with his family to join his father in the oil business.