Tom Long of Benedict said that as a boy he built model airplanes and “always wanted to be a pilot.”
Long, a licensed flight instructor with an airline transport pilot license and a mechanic with an inspection authority grade, now owns a few 1940s- and ’50s-era planes, some in flying order and others in stages of restoration, which he does himself. He is especially proud of his World War II Valiant BT-13, a two-seat bomber trainer he purchased in 1998 and hauled on a trailer home from California. He then spent two years restoring it.
“I fly it all the time,” he said, mentioning that when he and his wife go on fly-in breakfast trips meeting up with other pilots who fly in their planes to a restaurant, his plane grabs people’s attention. If it was bought new it would be worth close to $1 million, he said.
“I’ve always wanted something similar,” so he said when he saw it in Trade-A-Plane magazine he inquired. “All the parts were there except the engine and propeller,” Long said, adding that he preferred to have a freshly overhauled engine anyway.
Long, who also owns an aircraft restoration business in New York with a friend, said he likes the old-style planes, especially the World War II models.
“They’re getting harder and harder to find,” he said, but he can still get a lot of surplus parts, and he will buy parts for older planes he has because it’s a good selling point when he sells a restored plane.
Long also has a 1943 Cessna, plus a 1956 Cessna and 1958 Piper that are not in full flying condition, but he’s working on them. Long, who does both engine and body work, currently is focused on restoring a six-seat 1972 Stinson twin engine.
“This will be my travel airplane,” said Long, a corporate pilot, who retired in 2002 with 18,000 flying hours.
No one in his family was ever a pilot and they didn’t have much money while he was growing up, Long said, but after high school he “worked his way” through flight school at a local airport in Geneva, N.Y. His brothers and sisters have flown with him, but his parents never did, he said.
About two years after he earned his pilot’s license, in 1965 he bought the Taylorcraft he soloed in, restored it then sold it. His flight instructor was also a mechanic, so Long said that encouraged him to seek his mechanic’s license and his instructor’s license.
“I crop-dusted for a while in my early 20s,” he said, and then he flew for United Airlines for a while, but said he didn’t like it. He got a job flying for a corporation that leased planes and pilots and he became certified on many different aircraft, flying to destinations all over the world. He has flown CEOs of major companies, politicians, and even a few presidents, he said. Although the trips could be long at times, he said he enjoyed every minute of his career. And along with pleasure trips, he now displays his planes at air shows, including those at Patuxent River Naval Air Station.
Siblings share love of flying
With their father being an aeronautical engineer, John Eney and his sister, Martha Eney, grew up knowing about aviation. John, who is the manager of the airport at Chesapeake Ranch Estates in Lusby, said he was fascinated with airplanes as a boy. In 1962, he began taking flight lessons at Rutherford Field in Woodlawn, earning his pilot’s license in 1964 certified on a Piper Super Cub.
That led to a summer internship at Pax River.
“We were eating, sleeping and breathing airplanes,” he said, back when the Belvedere was nearly the only hotel in town.
The summer job led to employment with the Navy in Pennsylvania as a civilian engineer in advanced aircraft design. He designed autopilot systems and created tools for testing Navy airplanes’ stability and control, he said.
In 1967, he learned of a wrecked 1942 Waco two-seat open cockpit plane that was abandoned and for sale at the Park Hall airport south of the base, so he drove down and purchased the whole wreckage for $750.
“It’s what they call a basket case,” John said. All of the pieces were in baskets.
John trailered the wreckage back to Pennsylvania and he and his father worked on it as years turned into decades. His father made brand-new wooden wings from scratch, John said, and they worked at finding parts for the plane.
They got the blueprints for the plane from the Smithsonian, he said, and in 1979 they completed an engine overhaul with brand-new parts. They “pickled” the engine to preserve it, John said.
In the 1980s, John worked on getting Martha, 15 years his junior, interested in flying planes.
“He was hard-core airplanes. Me, not so much,” Martha said. But that all changed when her brother bought her a ride in an open-cockpit plane at a fly-in show in Ohio.
“And that was it. I didn’t know it could be that much fun,” she said.
Martha began taking flying lessons in the early 1980s in a 1946 Piper Cub in Bucks County, Pa. When she got her pilot’s license she wanted her own airplane, she said. She started working at the airport on weekends, and one weekend in 1985 she learned that the pilot who rented the plane she trained on crashed it in a field as he was landing. He was all right, but the plane, which had tripped over a wire, flipped over and the wings folded as it flopped over on its back, she said.
While the incident sounds tragic, it was an opportunity for Martha, who asked the airport mechanic what would happen to the plane. The airplane was totaled and it was offered “as is” at a sealed bid auction. Martha said she bid $500 and she got it in December 1985.
She and her brother, along with others, worked on repairing the plane for seven years until they finally decided to take it to an airplane mechanic shop in Delaware that specialized in Pipers. Four years later it was ready, she said.
“I’ve been flying it ever since,” said Martha, who flew the plane to CRE’s airport, where she moved in 1996.
When the base where John worked was closing, he said he was going to retire in 1996 after 35 years, but at the same time Pax River was expanding so instead he moved and began working at the base. One of his deciding factors, he said, was that he found a place that had a hangar and runway right out the door of a home for his and his sister’s plane.
Martha flies her plane occasionally, even going to Ocean City a few times, but John said he hasn’t flown since he moved back to Maryland.
Flying a magic carpet
Doug Poole of St. Leonard owns and flies a six-seat, twin-engine 1965 Super Skymaster, which he said his father, Robert S. Poole, purchased in 1977 and flew for pleasure and on U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary searches.
“Dad called it the Magic Carpet,” he said. Poole, founder of the Shark Poole Experience, flew with his father, who was an instructor, but Doug didn’t get his pilot’s license then, he said. After his father died in 2004, Doug’s son, Christopher, wanted to fly and convinced him to take lessons. In 2005 he became a licensed pilot “all because my son wanted to go flying,” he said. They fly to Ocean City many times each year, where his son enjoys fishing.
Gilbert Bauserman, owner of Maryland Airport in Indian Head, took his first flight lesson on Sept. 1, 1956. He owns a 1946 two-seat Taylorcraft plane he said his stepfather of 60 years, Jack Crawford, recovered in 1950 from Anacostia Naval Air Station and refurbished.
“That was my favorite aircraft,” Bauserman said of the Taylorcraft, which is housed at the airport. It uses 4.2 gallons per hour, getting 25 miles per gallon, and can fly 103 mph, Bauserman boasted.
Crawford, who died in February 2011, earned a Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award and a Charles Taylor Master Mechanic Award, which are prestigious awards commemorating 50 years, Bauserman said.
The Maryland Airport is currently undergoing a $30 million upgrade constructing a 4,300-foot runway, which is expected to be completed in 2013, he said.
“We’ll be the closest airport to D.C. that accommodates business jets,” Bauserman said.
Owning, flying Cold War jets
While St. Mary’s resident Art Nalls owns a 1939 Piper Cub through his business, Nalls Aviation, his most prized aircraft are two Cold War-era jets, which he flies to air shows around the country. His aircraft, which includes a second disassembled Harrier, are kept in hangars at the St. Mary’s County Airport. He has flown them at Pax River air shows and displays them.
Nalls, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and pilot, owns and is certified to fly an L-39 Albatros, which was designed and built in 1982 in what is now the Czech Republic, and a British Sea Harrier, known as a SHAR, completed in 1979.
“It’s the only one in the world in private hands,” he said, and he also claims it’s the oldest-surviving Harrier. The Harriers were used by the British in the Falkland Islands War in 1982 where they shot down 21 Argentine aircraft with no direct air-to-air losses, Nalls’ company literature states. The Harrier was used on aircraft carriers and can lift directly upward and hover as well as fly backward, Nalls said.
The Albatros is a two-seat trainer jet that can take off and land on an approximately 2,000-foot runway and can fly faster than 500 mph.
“It’s as close as you can get to a rocket with wings,” Nalls said.
While the L-39 runs on aviation fuel at about 90 gallons per hour, Nalls said jokingly, “It will run on just about anything. You can run it on vodka.” The Harrier uses three times the fuel, he added.
Nalls, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and the first in his family to go to college, flew most of his 22 years in the Marine Corps and did a three-year tour at Pax River as a test pilot.
While attending the academy, he said, he got his first flight in a jet at Eglin Air Force Base in Pensacola, Fla., not knowing what to expect or whether he would get sick.
“I loved it. I was Mr. Enthusiasm,” Nalls said. Although the flight was more than 25 years ago, he described it like it was yesterday, recalling the sound changes as the plane pressurized, and saying that it was a cloudy day, but as the jet climbed though the clouds it looked liked “a sea of cotton balls below us.”
“It was just like the angels singing,” he said, and he knew right then he wanted to fly jets.
He talked about getting to maneuver the stick the control and being allowed to do a barrel roll on his first flight. Nalls said the instructor pilot was surprised he had not flown before and told him he was pretty good.
“Something clicked,” he said, noting that to be a jet pilot one needs “confidence and a bit of arrogance.”
After retiring from the Marines in 1998, Nalls said he began making money as a real estate developer in the Washington, D.C., area but was not satisfied.
“I realized my love was aviation and I missed it,” he said.
He began attending commemorative Air Force air shows around the county, and asked pilots how to purchase government surplus jets and began researching Russian planes, starting his aviation company in 2001. After Nalls purchased the jets, the issue then was getting certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly them, he said. There were no certified instructors and no instructor manuals for the L-39, he said.
“The only reason the FAA let me do it was because I had already done it,” Nalls said. The FAA thoroughly questioned him in a five-hour oral examination on the entire operations of the plane, he said.
Certification on the Harrier was easier since Nalls was a former Harrier test pilot; he was allowed a 60-day learner’s permit. The certifying instructor gave him a check ride while remaining on the ground, he said.
Retired Marine Gen. Joe Anderson, a former Harrier test pilot, also flies the two aircraft for Nalls Aviation, Nalls said.
“These two Harrier pilots literally wrote the book the young top guns use today,” Nalls literature states, and they are both certified instructors on the Harrier.
Nalls also has a crew team of certified aircraft mechanics for his business, and they, too, have seen some challenges ensuring the jets continue to be maintained. Rich Gill and Christian Vlahos are both mechanics with an inspection authority grade, which allows them to inspect other mechanics’ work, Nalls said. Pete Weiskopf is also a mechanic and a certified flight instructor. They attend air shows with Nalls and on any given Saturday they can be found with Nalls at the airport hangar.
Nalls said his first aircraft was a World War II Russian fighter jet, but said it always had something wrong with it and it was expensive to maintain so he got rid of it.
When Nalls purchased the Harrier in 2005, Gill said he learned it had some parts missing although they were promised a complete airplane. Some of the parts were sent, and Gill said he got some replacement parts, but still he couldn’t get all of the parts. Gill said he had to re-engineer some parts they could not get.
“It’s been fun, exhilarating and aggravating,” Gill said.
charvat@somdnews.com
