Tony Caldwell

In the late 1930s, while Europe became embroiled in another war, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold sat at the head of the United States Army Air Corps and did the math. He didn’t like the answer. Arnold believed, correctly, that the first thing you do when you need an air force is teach a lot of young men to fly. The second thing is build airplanes. The third thing is everything else. The United States was not going to have time to do any of it in the sequence an orderly mind would prefer.

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.