Three Reasons to Restore an Antique Airplane
- Tony Caldwell
- Jun 9
- 10 min read
That Survive Rational Analysis
By Tony Caldwell, Founder — The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field
A friend wrote me last week. He is halfway through a project that, when finished, will be among the very best of its type anywhere in the world — the kind of careful, historically meticulous restoration that fewer than a handful of restorers on the planet would understand the full significance of without explanation, and that those who would understand it would recognize as a high-water mark of the type. He is also wondering whether to stop. The market for the airplane he is building has gone quiet in a way anyone paying attention to this corner of aviation can feel in their teeth, and the math on a finished sale, if he ever sold it, would make him cry. He has felt the pull of other interests lately — interests he set aside years ago when the airplane became the thing — and now those old loves are calling. He asked me, in the kind of question that disguises itself as a casual aside in a longer email, whether the rational thing to do is to cut his losses and walk.
I want to tell you what I told him. Or rather, what I started to tell him and then realized was a much longer answer than email could carry, because the question he asked is the question every antique-aviation restorer eventually asks himself, and the answer is one I had been working out in my own head for years before he made me write it down. Anybody who has spent serious money on an old airplane will, sooner or later, look at the receipts and the calendar and the unfinished fuselage and ask whether he ought to be doing something else with his life. Sometimes the question is honest and the answer is a hard yes — stop, sell, walk. More often the question is honest and the answer is something more interesting than that, and the trick is to know which one you are really being asked.
Let me clear out what does not survive analysis first, because doing so makes the rest of what I have to say cleaner. Restoring an antique airplane is, on a strict financial accounting, a loser. It is almost impossible to come out on a project today. The labor cost of doing the work right has outrun the resale market by a margin that nobody who restored an airplane fifteen years ago, when there was still a healthy crop of buyers waiting at the end of the line, would have predicted. The pool of buyers shrinks faster than the supply of airplanes. The airframes that survived will mostly keep surviving — the people who own them are the people who care about them — but the supply of warm bodies with the money, the time, the hangar, the temperament, and the still-living interest is contracting in a way you can plot on a chart and watch get steeper every quarter. So if your answer to why am I doing this is I'll sell it for more than I put into it, you should put your tools down. That answer has not been true for a long time, and there is no scenario short of a generational reversal of cultural and demographic trends in which it becomes true again in your lifetime.
So why do it. I think there are three reasons that survive being walked through cold, and only three, and I will take them in the order I worked them out for myself.
The first is the same reason serious gamblers gamble, when they are being honest with themselves about it. The disciplined gambler — the one who has been at it long enough to know himself — does not tell himself he is investing. He understands he is renting entertainment. The chips bought at the cashier's window are the price of an evening, in exactly the way a ticket to a concert or a dinner at a good restaurant or a green fee at a course he loves is the price of an experience. The reward is in the playing. The reward is in the room and the cards and the feel of being inside a thing that asks him to be sharp. The loss, calculated over time on an hourly basis, is the cost of admission, and it is a perfectly rational expense if the experience is something he values at that rate. The undisciplined gambler is the one who tells himself he is going to win it back, and he is also the one who eventually loses what he cannot afford to lose. The difference between the two is not the activity. It is the honesty.
Restoring an old airplane is the same proposition for the kind of craftsman who is honest with himself. The work itself is the reward. Standing in a quiet shop on a Saturday morning with a piece of spruce in one hand and a glue brush in the other, fitting a new wing rib into a fixture that has not held a wing rib in eighty years, is its own kind of payment. The hours spent learning to swage cable terminals the way they were swaged in 1932, or matching a paint formula to a chip on a fairing nobody has seen since the airplane left the factory, or sitting cross-legged in a fuselage trying to figure out what the original builder did with that one mystery bracket — those hours are not costs against an eventual sale price. They are the thing itself. If you compute the loss at the end of the project as a per-hour expense, and the per-hour number is something you can pay without resentment for the pleasure of the work, then you have paid a reasonable entertainment premium for the best entertainment a certain kind of person can buy. That is reason number one, and it is the most important of the three, because if you do not have it, no amount of the other two will get you to the end.
The second reason is more practical. You may want to fly a type of airplane that is not otherwise available, and a restoration project may be the only way you are ever going to get into the seat. I am restoring a Waco YMF-5 for exactly this reason. An open-cockpit Waco F-series biplane has been one of the airplanes I have wanted to fly hard, regularly, and for years at a time since I knew what airplanes were. There are originals — the Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field has several, and they are loved — but a survivor 1934 Waco F is not the airplane you take up on a Saturday afternoon to remind yourself why you bought it. The fabric and the wood and the steel and the history all argue for a careful sortie schedule and a careful pilot, and that is exactly right for an airframe of that vintage. To actually fly a Waco F the way it was meant to be flown — hard enough that you feel the airplane, on enough Saturdays in a year that you are friends with it again every spring — you need an airframe built to live that life. The YMF-5 is that airplane. It is faithful to the type Waco settled on in the mid-thirties, built around the same proportions and the same handling, and engineered with the kind of modern attention to inspection access and material specification that makes it practical to put real hours on. And it is, in the present moment, the only way to get one. The market for original Wacos in flyable, exercisable condition is essentially closed. The revival airplane is the realistic path, and even that path is a project — it is hugely expensive, will certainly cost more to finish than I will ever recover if I sell it, and runs years longer than the project plan I built in my head when I started. But none of that was the question. The question was whether I wanted to be a man who flies an open-cockpit Waco on Saturday mornings for the rest of my flying life. The answer was yes. The YMF-5 was the way to get there.
The third reason is the one that ties the first two together, and it is the one I think is true even when the first two are only partly true. You may love the airplane itself, and love the process of bringing it back, in a way that makes the entire accounting beside the point. Plenty of people accumulate beautiful things they do not use. I have been a semi-serious photographer since I was fourteen. I have, in a cabinet not twenty feet from where I am sitting, several thousand dollars' worth of camera bodies and lenses I have not touched in months, because the time and the attention they need has gone somewhere else. The cameras are not worth, on resale, anything like what they cost. If I had been smarter I would have cut my losses years ago. I was not smarter. I bought them, used them, loved them, and then they sat. That is what happens to most beautiful things people own. It is why every car-and-airplane-and-boat collector dies with a hangar or a garage full of objects that go for cents on the dollar at the estate sale. Most of life moves on from most of its enthusiasms, and the objects of those enthusiasms end up where they end up. The airplane is different from the camera cabinet only if the airplane is something you love in a way that asks you to keep showing up. The work, in that sense, is what keeps the love alive. The love, in that sense, is what keeps the work meaningful. They are reflexive. You cannot really separate them. If you love the airplane and the process of restoring it, you will keep going. If you do not, you will find yourself one weekend looking at the fuselage and realizing it is time to walk. That is fine. It is honest. There is no shame in walking when the love has gone somewhere else. The shame is in continuing to spend the money and the years on a thing you no longer love because you told yourself a story about an eventual sale that was never going to happen anyway.
So those are the three reasons. The work is its own reward, if you love the work. The airplane is its own reason, if it is the only way to have that airplane. And the love of the plane and the process — taken together, in the right kind of person — makes the rest of the accounting beside the point. I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that the financial reality does not matter. It does. Money is never unlimited, no matter who you are, and the discipline of asking these questions honestly is what keeps a person from running himself into the ground. The asymmetric demographics, the rational sequencing of acquisitions in a finite life, the cold-eyed look at what a buyer will or will not pay for a finished airplane in 2026 — all of that matters, and I have spent a lot of time getting it right. What I am arguing is that for the right person, doing the right project, on the right terms, the financial column and the human column come out differently, and the human column is the one that matters.
What I told my friend was something close to this. If you love the work, finish the airplane. The work is the wage. The airplane, when it is done, will be the best of its type, because that is how you have been building it, and the world will be richer for having it in the air than it was without it. If the love is gone — if you find yourself driving to the shop and not wanting to walk in — then sell. Sell it as a project, take the loss, use the time to chase the new thing while you still have the time to chase. A loss taken early is better than a loss taken late. There is no virtue in finishing a project you no longer love just because you started it. And if neither answer is right, if the answer is somewhere in between, give yourself an honest year. Put real hours on it. See how you feel in the shop. Notice whether you walk past the project on the way to your car and look at it, or whether you don't. The airplane will tell you. They always do.
I will say one last thing, because it is the thing I most believe and the thing I think anyone who has done one of these projects will recognize. When the airplane is finished — and they do get finished, even the ones that take fifteen years longer than they were supposed to — it goes on flying. It carries the work you put into it forward through whoever owns it next, and the one after that, and the one after that. Most of the airplanes in our hangar at Mustang Field were finished by craftsmen who are not alive to see what their work has become. We have airplanes whose restoration logs run hundreds of pages, signed by hands that do not write anymore. Those craftsmen did the work because they loved the work, because the airplane was the only way to have that airplane, and because they loved the airplane itself. They were not paid back in cash. They were paid back in something else, which they understood at the time, and which the rest of us are now the beneficiaries of. That is the answer to my friend's question and to the question every antique-aviation restorer is going to ask himself sooner or later. It is also why I keep showing up on Saturdays, in a hangar full of airplanes that should have been impossible to keep flying — and why the YMF-5 will get finished, regardless of what the market does or does not do — and why I would not have spent the last several years of my life any other way.
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The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field is open Wednesday - Friday from 11 am to 4 pm and every Saturday from 10 am to 2 pm — no appointment required, and admission is always free. We’re at 6600 S. Mustang Field Road, Hangar 3, El Reno, Oklahoma, at El Reno Regional Airport.
▸ The Museum: thecaldwellcollection.org
▸ About Me: tonycaldwell.net
▸ The Dream Wacos Collection: dreamwacos.com
▸ Contact: info@thecaldwellcollection.org
The Caldwell Collection at Mustang Field is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in 2024. Aircraft donations are tax-deductible; consult your tax advisor.
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