March 2005
Astute readers of this column will notice that, effective this month, we’ve got a change at the very top. The new title for this section of the magazine has become “Full Circle” because it will more accurately describe where my aviation head is at and where I expect it to be for the foreseeable future.
I will, to stretch this metaphor ad nauseam, be going “full circle” with much of the material that I’ll be covering from this point on—but I’ll have more specifics on those changes in next month’s column.
This month, I need to talk about other, more immediate alterations that deal with the past and the present. My partner and I have decided to sell our light twin, the totally restored Piper Turbo Aztec that I’ve had for the past five-plus years. The reasons for selling are varied, but it basically boils down to two: my partner has some health considerations that need to be dealt with, and, for both of us, the intended mission assignment for our wonderful light twin has been altered drastically by the changes in our lives.
Both of us are retired airline guys and, frankly, after flying the world for over 80 years between us, we discovered that we just didn’t want to take those extended long-haul trips anymore (I’d rather stay home on my ranch with my horses, and Jim is doing other stuff). The raison d’etre of the light twin was something that we no longer really had a practical use for, and it would be a crime to keep such a capable example of General Aviation transportation saddled with hardly anything to do beyond local pleasure jaunts.
In this particular instance the brand name on the airframe doesn’t matter a wit because it would have made no difference had I elected to restore and transform a Cessna 310 rather than a Piper Aztec.
That was, in fact, exactly the choice that I wrestled with long and hard. Cessna and Piper are both very fine brands, and the final decision came about as much because of what was available as any other reason.
When I was just about ready to make the plunge, I happened to run across a perfect project airplane in south Florida—a 1966 Turbo Aztec C with 4,000 total time that had been stored in a hangar for the past 11 years.
It had run-out engines, a stack of mostly dead and very ancient radios and a real need for a thorough cosmetic update. But the airframe was solid, the history of the airplane was good and the price was right. With my two trusty mechanics we worked on the airplane for three days before getting the airframe and engines in good enough shape for a ferry permit flight.
One hour of flight time later, we landed and parked the airplane at my mechanic’s home field to begin a nearly one-year restoration project. Today, it’s been over five years since I first laid my eyes on that forlorn airframe.
This nearly forty-year-old aeronautical steed rolled out of the production factory not very long after the JFK assassination, to put its age in perspective—yet it has been transformed into what many have said is the finest example of a light twin ever created. From my point of view, which includes 500 operational hours at the controls, this airplane has turned out to be everything I could have expected—and even more so.
Less prejudiced crowds have also judged it and given it very high marks: our airplane won the first-place award for “Best Low-Wing Piper” at the Sentimental Journey gathering in 2002, and it also won “Best Contemporary Twin” last year at the Sun ‘n Fun Fly-in.
Matter of fact, this totally restored twin has never failed to win first place at any competition in which it was entered. All of this has made me pretty darn nostalgic, and even though it makes nothing but good sense to sell the airplane to someone who will use it just as it was designed to be operated, that prospect has caused me to reflect back on all the twists and turns in the road that led us to where we are.
The enormous job of taking an old light twin to better-than-new condition was done with a concept that I had gotten from Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, in a letter he wrote to George Washington in 1792: “Delay is preferable to error” Jefferson had said—and so did I, on nearly countless occasions during this project.
When my mechanic and I first laid eyes on the airframe, we sat down to estimate the time and costs involved. Using our most conservative guesses, it eventually turned out that we had missed each target goal by more than half. In retrospect, being within earshot of 150 percent of your worst-case scenario just ain’t all that bad when it comes to tasks of this enormity.
What made the job possible at all was my relationship with Dave Heyburn, the owner of Dave’s Aircraft in Edgewater, Fla. An A&P/IA, Dave was an indispensable key ingredient to the project and a guy who has more across-the-board knowledge on General Aviation machines and all the junk that goes in them than anyone I’ve ever met.
The second key ingredient was Dave’s number two man, Billy Burton, who was the general backup guy in the maintenance area and the lead guy when it came to the cosmetics. Billy dealt with the paint, fiberglass and sheet metal details that would have made the manufacturer envious. During its nearly one year in the shop, two other airport guys pitched in to help.
I couldn’t afford their normal rate because they were both doctors, but their volunteer work on the airplane was a godsend on many a day, and all I had to do was buy lunch occasionally. Skip Schildecker and his father, Bill, have several airplanes in an adjacent hangar on the field. Skip, who is our family physician, lent a hand some, but it was his father—a very young 80 years old at the time, and, today, still flying and working on airplanes at the age of 85—who provided a set of hands on many projects and was a real whiz-bang with assembling the engine baffling.
My job was “Parts Manager,” but I soon discovered that “Chief Scavenger” was a far more accurate title. Getting new stuff for the airplane was the easiest job, although lots of telephone and fax time was spent on being certain that everything was FAA-approved.
If we ever want the government to simplify the burdensome regulations pertaining to what can and can’t be put on a certified airplane, let’s have the FAA Administrator attempt to restore something that is over 30 years old.
Lead time on getting parts was the classic good news/bad news conundrum. Yes, we can get that part for you, but delivery time is six months. Piper had some long lead times for a few things, but did manage to get the items to us on or before the promised date. A month or two was a common waiting period from many of the suppliers if the part happened to be out of stock.
My best decision, bar none, was in going with two factory remanufactured engines from Textron Lycoming. The old engines had been run out and had already been overhauled once before. Although factory remanufactured engines cost more than doing it some other ways, getting those zero-time logbooks was a benefit and the Lycoming truck showed up as scheduled with two engines that were exactly what they were supposed to be.
Right from the first kick of the starters and on through today, both these powerplants have operated perfectly. The further we dug into the airframe, the more parts we replaced just because we had burrowed so far down that right now was a practical time to do it.
New wing bladder tanks from Eagle Fuel Cells, new valves for the Met-Co-Aire fiberglass tip tanks that provided 24 additional gallons in each wing, lots of airframe parts from Diamond Aire in Kalispell, Mont., and a total engine/airframe monitoring package from Electronics International, to name just a few. In nearly all instances, working with these folks turned out to be a painless experience.
Later on, as the years went by, I would add new things from others, and all of those additions continued the trend of making our light twin better/safer/more efficient than it had been. Bendix/King, Insight, Ryan International, GAMI, Century Flight Systems, Garmin, Whelen—the list of what’s on the airplane is a list of who’s who in General Aviation.
Back to nostalgia, I sometimes think about this airplane’s first flight. Mechanic Dave put his money where his mouth was and climbed into the right seat, with me in the left. Billy had a video camera and the Schildeckers and a few others were on hand to watch.
Both engines caught on the first blade and we taxied out to the active runway. Engine runups and checklist complete, we were ready to go. I did a thorough preflight briefing, with Dave and I agreeing on the parameters for an aborted takeoff or an immediate relanding.
I rolled onto the runway, pushed up the power and released the brakes. The airplane rolled forward smartly, straight and true. I pulled lightly on the controls to be certain they were there and feeling fine, then tugged further back on the wheel.
We broke ground at blueline airspeed, with both engines producing a full-throated and reassuring roar. I glanced over at Dave, who gave a thumbs-up.
Other than getting a few paint chips blown down on us through the ventilation system, there were no surprises. After a little fiddling around, we returned to the airport, set up a wide pattern, then touched down. That was the first flight, with many more to follow.
The moments that jump to the forefront of my memory involved sailing over the Rockies on our way south out of Montana toward California, crossing Lake Tahoe on our way into San Francisco on a cloudless day, getting beneath the JFK traffic on our path into Republic Airport on Long Island, negotiating the traffic maze around Dallas as we steered northwest toward New Mexico, dealing with rain and low clouds on a GPS approach to Upstate New York. The list is nearly endless and, as the song has said, they can’t take that away from me. I’ve been there, and I’ve got the T-shirts to prove it.
But now it’s time to hand this aerial chariot over to someone who’d like to do the same sorts of trips we once did—it’s for what this airplane was designed and created. My partner, getting help from a computer-literate friend of his, created a website for the airplane and then placed an ad in a few of the aviation marketplaces.
Two days after the ad went public he got a telephone call from a man who was interested and wanted me to show our airplane to him as soon as possible. Two days later, he and his lovely wife—more about them in a future article—came, saw and bought on the spot. I’ve often said that spending bucks to make your airplane really special is not something that owners should resist because of resale considerations.
My experience with this and previous airplanes is that if the job is done with care and quality, a discriminating buyer will be around to snap it up when it’s time to sell. I’ll talk more about all of these ideas and my most recent light twin sales experience soon enough, but next month, right here, I’ll tell you exactly why my department in the magazine has changed its name to “Full Circle.”
Editor-at-large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36 year career as a US Airways pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, a best-selling novelist, and the owner of more than a dozen personal airplanes.
