Tony Caldwell

When you restore an old airplane, you spend a lot of time with the paperwork. FAA registration files, bills of sale, airworthiness certificates, repair logs, affidavits from long-dead mechanics. If you're patient, and you read carefully, the paperwork starts to tell you something the airplane can't tell you on its own: the names of the people who signed for it, flew it, crashed it, fixed it, loved it, lost it, sold it, and passed it along.

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.

Oklahoma produced an extraordinary generation of aviators between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. Some of them are famous. Some of them should be. A few of them are connected to the aircraft in this hangar in ways that still surprise me when I trace the threads. This is their story...