I was up at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, the other week listening to the curator of the place, a very interesting gentleman named Stewart Bailey, talking with wonder about his boss, the octogenarian owner and founder of Evergreen Airlines, Del Smith. Smith, like many great achievers in aviation, has contributed greatly to preserving aviation history not because he ever set out to preserve anything but because he is a doer, a guy who never said “no” to an opportunity or even the possibility of an opportunity. The result was an aviation business, Evergreen International Airlines, which currently operates a fleet of a dozen 747s that fly around the world doing … well, doing pretty much anything you can imagine a 747 doing, and then a few things.
The wealth that Smith amassed from Evergreen was used to create the museum, something that never would have happened without the airline or without Smith’s love not only of airplanes themselves but also of using airplanes to do tough jobs, like fight fires, eradicate deadly flying pests and haul huge amounts of freight to places in the world once considered so remote that, before Evergreen, nobody hauled freight there.
The museum, as you might know, is home to one of the largest airplanes ever built, the Hughes H-4 Hercules, almost universally known — to Howard Hughes’ dismay — as the “Spruce Goose.” Without Smith, it’s very likely the airplane would have been chopped up and distributed to widely scattered aviation museums piece by piece.
But at Evergreen, thanks to Del Smith, the Spruce Goose is whole again. The nickname Spruce Goose, by the way, was a pejorative moniker the press gave the project to highlight its boondoggle nature, which irked Hughes greatly despite the fact it was patently true, or, more likely, because of that fact. Donald Douglas was said to have turned down the project, when offered it, because it was impractical.
As much as you have to love the idea of an eight-engine flying boat with a wingspan greater than a football field, the idea behind it — that of a flying troop ship used to outsmart the German U-boats of the day — wasn’t all that clever to begin with. One school of thought was that Hughes “flew” the Spruce Goose on its only flight — well after the war was over — simply to shut his critics up. It seemed to work. Whether the airplane ever actually flew or just simply floated up into ground effect remains a controversy today among some. I’ve seen the footage. The Hercules sure seems to be flying to me. For such a behemoth — it was designed to carry 750 troops and it’s projected loaded weight was 400,000 pounds — it was and is a true beauty. I got to sit in it. If you go to McMinnville, you might get to too.
The Spruce Goose isn’t the only airplane at the museum. Far from it. There are dozens of other gems, including a few of my favorites, a Messerschmitt ME-262 jet, an SR-71 Blackbird and a like-new B-17 — Smith found the ball turret decorating a bar and had to buy the entire bar to get the single component; he reportedly turned around and sold the bar, after having removed the turret, for a profit.
If you haven’t been to McMinnville, you need to go. There are so many remarkable airplanes there that you could, if you love flying as I do, spend all day or a few days, walking from model to model, from P-51 to F-104, marveling at these machines. While you’re at it, you might just want to reflect on the nature of this place, a museum celebrating the beauty of airplanes by a guy who loved them chiefly for what they could do for him, make a buck. You’ve got to love that connection.
Limited Visibility
As we all know, the aviation world has changed irrevocably over the past couple of decades. While we all feel as though this is new stuff, that such change has never before happened in the history of aviation, it’s not true. It has happened. It’s happened over and over again. While it’s hard to imagine pilots pining for the glory days when real airplanes used wing warping for flight control, that’s the way it works. Times change, technologies change, the economics of flying changes, and the regulatory climate changes too.
Many of us in this generation think of the Big Three aircraft manufacturers, Beechcraft, Piper and Cessna, as having defined the majority of the history of piston general aviation. But the truth is that the rise of these companies to their heights in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were each building thousands of airplanes a year of many different model types, was a huge but relatively short-lived postwar phenomenon. The effect of that explosion of activity is still strongly felt today because we’re still enjoying the fleets of the airplanes these companies produced during their heydays.
Piston aircraft manufacturing today is different than it once was. The Big Three are no longer so big. These companies are still making some great airplanes, but they’re not turning out nearly as many of them, and they’re building far fewer model types as well. Beechcraft produces just two piston models, and Cessna makes just three (four if you count the LSA Skycatcher) and Piper just a few, the Mirage, the Matrix (pretty much the same airplane but without pressurization) and a handful of Seminoles and PA-28s. Times have changed and so have these companies. They’re smaller, in many ways smarter, and more attuned to the importance of being lean.
While times have been changing these past 30 years, companies have come and gone, and new ones are emerging. Could Pipistrel be a coming giant? It doesn’t sound likely, but one thing history teaches us is that unlikely things have a funny way of coming true.
Again, it’s nothing new, companies coming and going. While it might be strange to imagine pilots in the 1950s fretting the loss of Stinson, Luscombe and Globe/Temco, they did indeed do just that. It’s only in great hindsight that we think of the loss of these once-impressive companies as being fated, as being the necessary result of the march of progress. The truth is that nobody had that kind of perspective back in the day. Back then it was simply a tragic loss.
Institutional Knowledge
As aviation changes, one of the casualties is institutional knowledge. I’ve been around airplanes for quite some time, but in some ways I consider myself a newcomer. When I want to know something about the Golden Era of air racing, I still call my dad, who at 86 seems to me to know it all. Despite my relative inexperience, at a briefing it’s not unusual for me to know more about the history of the airplane that I’m being briefed on than the usually younger person doing the briefing. For the record, they always know more about the details of the current model than I do; they’re just foggy on what model it might have evolved from or who the CEO was at the time it was launched decades ago. They are, after all, salespeople, not historians.
Things have changed across the aviation industry as companies have pulled up roots and moved from one city to a different, distant one, as they’ve abandoned certain product lines and scooped up others, as they’ve lost workers to layoffs and retirement, and as they’ve worked hard to stay profitable in challenging economic times by cutting staffs and programs.
Often, the sad result of these upheavals is the loss of history. Some of that is natural. The last guy who knew everything about the history of the Piper Aztec has long since departed the Piper factory, so it’s a natural, if sad, fact for that history to be gone.
The thing that’s preventable is the loss of the tangible history, documents, blueprints, photographs, movies and, more and more, digital archives. Unfortunately, when companies are going through big changes, the last things they tend to concern themselves with are these kinds of artifacts. So the records of the airplanes just disappear. What happens to them exactly is hard to say, but I’ve heard stories of file cabinets full of precious history, decades-old photographs, drawings and documents being loaded into dumpsters as the company was vacating a once-busy facility and heading out of town.
It might seem that nothing can be done about this state of affairs, but that’s not true either. For those of us who care about aviation history, we can vote with our wallets and our volunteer time to preserve it. We can give as generously as possible to an organization that promotes and celebrates aviation history. Be it a museum, like Evergreen in McMinn-ville or the Museum of Flight in Seattle, or a living aviation museum, like the Commemorative Air Force, there is much work to be done and a constant shortage of funds to do it.
It’s a fact of life that we can’t preserve every drop of history there is to save, but organizations like these do great work in keeping alive whatever flying history they possibly can. If you’re like me, being a part of that work in any way possible makes me feel I’m making some kind of a difference.
