I recently visited my Ford 4AT Tri-Motor project going together slowly in Michigan at Great Lakes Aviation. It had an interesting history and was flown by Island Airways to haul school kids and mail from Port Clinton, OH to a small island in Lake Erie. They owned several Fords over the years and this was the first one they purchased and the last one they sold as it had smaller and more fuel-efficient engines for what they needed it for. I acquired the aircraft in the late 1980’s and flew it back from California to Florida in only 4 1/2 days!
Unfortunately, this was one of my aircraft that was highly damaged by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The day before the Hurricane, I flew it down to the Homestead Airport about 20 miles away and put it in a big concrete hangar with many other aircraft looking to dodge the storm. That night it hit landfall as only one of two Catagory 5 Hurricane’s ever to hit our country with sustained winds of 165 mph, gusting to almost 200! After several days of disbelief and digging out of the collapsed hangar at the Weeks Air Museum, I borrowed a small plane and flew down to check on the Ford. I was in shock when I got there. The hangar doors had all blown off, an 18-wheel semi-tractor trailer fuel truck had been blown over on its side, pushed all the way across the hangar floor by the wind, and then smashing into the Ford! The fuselage was twisted in half aft of the passenger door and both wings had been ripped off!
Right Outboard Wing - Check out those Multiple Spars!
It had been several years since I had seen the project and great progress had been made on the center-section and wing panels. It has been somewhat of a slow restoration because I have another Ford 5AT Tri-Motor to fly at Fantasy of Flight. On one of my early visits, while the fuselage was going together, I happened to notice they were riveting the skins on with AN470 Universal head rivets. These rivets became popular around WWII but the Ford had been built in 1928. I questioned this and asked, knowing full well the answer, “Didn’t they use round head rivets originally?” The owner replied, “Yes, but when the aircraft had been damaged previously in an accident it had been repaired with the later rivets.” I made them drill all the rivets out and replace them with the original round-style head!
When completed, it will sport a washroom with a wooden toilet complimented by a small sign, “Don’t use the toilet over populated areas!” It will also be the only airliner in the world I know of where a passenger can slide their window back and hang their arm out the side!
Kermit
I recently test flew our Travelair 4000 after a complete top-overhaul by our engine restoration specialist, Andy Salter. The aircraft sports a Wright J-5, which is the same engine that safely took Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927. This particular airplane had been out of license for eight years so it was great to get it flying again! Andy is currently working on building up another J-5 to power our Spirit of St. Louis replica. This is an extremely rare running engine and is possibly one of the very few, if not the only Wright J-5 engine currently flying!
During George’s visit, I also got a chance to tell him about the progress on my Book “The Journey Never Ends,” which is a ten-Program chronicle of my exploration of consciousness experiences at TMI over a two-year period. I’ve pretty much finished the beginning of the Book and am narrowing down on the editing of the ten-Program Chapters. Most of this process is just going over and over the material making small editing changes. My main hurdle will be to corral in all this information into a great summary, which I currently have in rough form. I made significant progress on a recent vacation while in the mountains of Utah and am looking forward to finding the time to finish it up. There will be a number of approvals I’ll need to get from The Monroe Institute, as some of the information in the Book included is proprietary.
Several years ago I sent three WWI Mercedes engines down to my friend Peter Jackson in New Zealand. He had been looking for something to copy and couldn’t find one anywhere. We cut a deal to get them all running as well as use them to help Peter remanufacture new ones! Last summer, while in NZ I got to watch my first one running on a test stand.