The Money Pit
You guys know which movie Chuck is talking about, right?! Or are we really dating ourselves here? We grew up with all the 80’s movies and so, by default, so did Chuck even though he’s not quite as old as us.
I personally love looking at and into old hangars. You never know what you’ll find in there (of course there is the occasional rat to deal with) and I have seen some great things. Unfortunately I don’t get around the really small airports much anymore flying the heavy helicopters (Chucks hangar would probably be blown down by a Skycrane) but occasionally we end up near old hangars. The best part is if you end up running into some great guy who is in the middle of restoring a really cool plane. I have to say, I have never run into anybody in an old hangar that wasn’t excited to share his and/or his aircraft’s story. Imagine taking a tour through some of the old “Skunk Works” hangars?!!
What are some cool airports with interesting old hangars you guys have stumbled across?
Camden Woodruff Field,SC and Breckenridge, TX come to mind first. 🙂
I’ll second Breckenridge. I was flying back from Lubbock to Waco with a pilot-in-training one night, the weather rapidly deteriorated both ahead of us and behind us, and we decided to land at the first airport we could find. We ended up spending the night there in the airplane as someone else had taken the crew car to a hotel prior to our arrival. When we woke up the next morning, the ceilings were still low IFR and we were in a VFR only airplane. We ended up looking around the airport and stumbled on a P-38 that was being refurbished for RedBull as well as a Corsair that at the the time looked a lot like Chuck’s.
Years ago it was awesome to wander the airports in Dayton Ohio. Morain Airpark had a great collection of Waco Biplanes (Owner flew 2 of them over Kings Island) and an assortment of older planes. Just about every plane on the field was a taildragger.
For the german readers: “The money pit” was named “Geschenkt ist noch zu teuer”. I loved that film, especially the laugh of Tom Hanks at the moment the bathtub crashes through the ceiling 😉
Reminds me of a few years ago when I was at MoD Machrihanish as a young cadet we came across a chap that had recently finished restoring a P-51 Mustang (he had bought a hanger on the cheap and there she was in a load of crates). A few days later he gave us on the ranges a little wave of the tips when he flew out of the airfield.