The One That Wouldn't Go Away: How One Waco Waited

In 2010, my friends Les Banta, John Hazelton, and I went to Sun' N Fun. It was the first visit there for me and was a bit mind-blowing. Walking the lines of planes in the "vintage" area, I came across a Waco Classic biplane. Open-mouthed I walked around and around it marveling at its beautiful lines. Telling Les "I'm going to buy one" I had no idea how that would come to pass, but a few short months later he and I became partners on a different red Waco Classic YMF 5.

Years later in 2018, that airplane having been sold, my friend Barry Branin was busy sending me all over the place to look at Waco's. One of those was on the coast of North Carolina where an award-winning restoration, by the legendary father and son team of John and Scott Shue, sat in the hangar of a former military and airline pilot who had grown too old to fly it. Barry was practically breathless describing the quality of the Shue's work. So, Les and I hopped in my TBM and flew nearly 1200 NM to go see it.

Meeting Jack and Glynda Hill was a real pleasure. They had two Waco's including a beautiful cabin they were still flying. Jack had commissioned the UPF 7 nearly two decades earlier and when it was finished circa 2007 he began putting what became almost seven hundred hours on it. The only problem, for me at least, was there was a lot of surface corrosion which made me worry that the plane would need to come apart. So, we reluctantly said goodbye to the Hills, who were incredibly gracious, not knowing we'd never meet again.

On the way home we had a pressurization failure in the flight levels with trucks rolling on our arrival back in Oklahoma. This episode just served to punctuate a long and memorable day I'll never forget.

Years passed and, as Barry continued to prompt me with photos and phone numbers, my collection of Waco's began to grow. I saw the little red Waco at the National Waco Club Fly-In at Poplar Grove in 2021 and looked it over. Its new owner Marla Boone, who is an A&P, had begun cleaning it up. I didn't see any corrosion. Marla and I visited again a year or so later and she sent me a tv clip of NC32071. I looked up some magazine articles about Jack Hill and his plane and remembered the Hills and our brief time together as I thought about Jack's service to our country and passion for flying with the wind in the wires.

Happening to be in Chicago the next year when the Waco Museum's Fly-In was taking place, just a few hundred miles away in Troy, Ohio I decided to go. And Barnstormers had a beautiful red Fairchild advertised on a nearby grass strip so I thought I'd take a look at that too. As its owner Sean Saddler and I were admiring the recent restoration of the Fairchild his next-door neighbor opened her hangar door and rolled out NC32071. What a coincidence as Marla Boone was Sean's next-door neighbor!

She'd done a lot of cleanup on the Waco and was enjoying flying it. Ohio is a verdant place and when the weather is warm, is filled with countless grass runways. The perfect place to fly a Waco! Thinking I'd like not to see it again, I bid farewell to Jack and Marla's little red plane as I took off for the south in another little red plane - this one a single-wing Fairchild.

But that wasn't my last encounter with Marla or her biplane. The very next year, sitting in my hotel room, bored, in advance of a business meeting, I was scrolling through the Barnstormer ads when her name jumped off the page. The UPF 7 was for sale again! Ignoring the fact that I already had a perfect red UPF 7, restored by the renowned Rare Aircraft shop, I immediately called Marla. After a brief conversation, we agreed I'd be the new caretaker of Jack's airplane. My thought was I'd cut the fabric off, as the paint looked old, tired, and damaged from its years on the coast, and recover and repaint it in its original Civilian Pilot Training Program livery.

But after getting NC32071 home and rubbing a bit on the paint, I realized that it could be saved and called in Jamie Lyons to work his magic. A couple of weeks later the ramp outside my hangar was pink from the washing of sponges filled with the red Waco's paint. But inside the hangar stood a beautiful, gleaming red Waco as perfect as the day it rolled out of the Shue's shop in rural Pennsylvania.

So, no military livery for this Waco. After some more work to make its wheel pants fit, it is ready to live and fly in its permanent home at the Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field.

What about the other beautiful red UPF in the Collection?

It's for sale...