It's said that the good lord protects children and fools. Perhaps that explains it. For on some level, Clark Seaborn, Hank Galpin, Gary Underland and Ron Hackworth all know they must be fools. Who else, after all, would take on the challenge of taking a few scraps of rotting wood and twisted metal from planes so rare that engineering drawings don't even exist for them anymore … and try to make them fly again?
"Why did I agree to do it?" laughs Seaborn, who spent 17 years restoring a 1929 Fokker Super Universal. "Sheer stupidity."
"Because I didn't know any better, I suppose," answers Underland, to explain why he undertook the 30,000-hour task of rebuilding a Sikorsky S-38 flying boat.
"I dunno. Because this is an historic airplane for Montana, and it's nicely shaped," Galpin says, looking at the1928 Travel Air 6000 he spent 10 years and 10,000 hours restoring. And then, as if sensing a need for a more practical, understandable reason, he grins and adds, "It also came with a bathroom."
"Well, they asked me if I thought it could be rebuilt," Hackworth says of the N9M-B prototype Northrop Flying Wing, whose 13-year restoration he supervised. "I said I thought it could." He pauses, a rueful smile spreading across his face. "In retrospect, I was wrong."
And yet, even as they don sheepish grins and duck their heads, knowing their odysseys must seem like lunacy to the vast majority of people walking the earth, there's a quiet pride that exudes from their twinkling eyes as they relate their individual sagas. For men like Seaborn and Galpin aren't really fools. They're romantics of the highest order. And while the line between those two categories may seem awfully thin at times, there is a difference. There's a kind of magic in the soul of a romantic that makes the world a gentler and more bearable place-a sense of valuing beauty for its own sake, and a belief, in the face of no known proof or evidence, in possibilities, miracles, and wonder.
Belief, of course, can be a powerful thing. And so sometimes … just sometimes-a romantic can actually make impossible feats and miracles come true. For the Flying Wing did, indeed, fly again. And here I am, holding onto the polished wood controls of a living, breathing and breathtaking Sikorsky
S-38-one of only two flying-and looking out the window at a Fokker Universal wagging its wings in the sky. And somewhere up ahead of us, as we make our way across Michigan with the 2003 National Air Tour, is Hank Galpin's beautiful, Montana-proud Travel Air 6000.
Now, one might argue that an airplane restoration isn't a miracle at all- just a lot of hard work. And there's no doubt that all these projects involved a tremendous amount of work. The numbers alone bear out that fact. And the people involved in these rebuilding efforts had to go to great lengths to make them happen.
