A dream collection, hidden in Illinois
This week, I loaded up and headed north. Alex Wolski had me cornered into checking out a Yak-55 for sale in Illinois. The ride to Chicago was uneventful, and from there, a 50 minute flight put me on the ground in Champaign. The rental car got me out to the airport at Urbana, Frasca Field.
David Frasca owns the Yak. He let me into the hangar, then had to step back to his office to finish some work, then he joined me while I finished looking his ship stem to stern. The yak was in excellent shape;; I told my friend Alex to buy it right off. The tailfeathers needed recovering, but other than that, the plane was in fine order. As I worked, we talked about airplanes. I’ve got some experience flying neat planes, but his favorites watered my eyes. His current pride and joy is a Wildcat, and it’s not an F4F like we all know and love. It’s an F2M, the wildcat with a big engine. We talked about flying warbirds, why mustangs are overrated, and other great mysteries of the universe. When we parted for the evening, David left me with an invitation for the next morning.
“Come on by the factory, and I’ll show you around,” he said. “Then, we can go through the hangars.”
Hangars, plural.
The tour of the factory was amazing. The technology going into today’s flight simulators is phenomenal.. and I got to see it all coming together in various stages of completion. But, my eye wandered as we walked through hallways covered in photographs of warbirds and exotic airplanes that I dreamed of. We left the factory and walked to the Frasca family’s hangars.
We walked into one hangar, and a 737 nose blocked the view – workers stored it there while they made room in the factory for it. “This came from a salvaged plane,” Frasca told me, “We’re going to turn it into a simulator.”
Behind the 737, I immediately recognized the nose-on view of a Foke-Wolfe 190. There are few such menacing shapes in aviation that can make ones blood run so cold – and this one is only a full-scale replica. Eyeballing the project, a homebuilt kit available from Europe, one almost could say it’s a scaled-down replica, until you take a gander at the wings. There’s no doubt that this is the real McCoy.
Behind the 190, a Pitts Model 12 project stood on its gear, fairings dangling from the legs, begging for a little work to get her flying.
“Come on, let’s look at some airplanes,” David said. Indeed, let’s do.
As he pulled a sliding door open, my eyes gazed on the folded wings of the Wildcat, a warbird the public long ago wrote off. Stubby and slow doesn’t equate to sexy when you field the Wildcat against the Mustang in the court of public opinion. I walked around her twice, asnd my jaw dragged hon the floor. The Wildcat was a remarkably simple airplane. The landing gear is mechanically driven by hand through a crank in the cockpit driving a bicycle chain in the gear well that sucks the wheels up into the gear wells. Oil dripped from the shiny skins, and there was no mistake – this warbird was in fine shape, but she flies and is treated as an airplane. No white glove treatment here. David opened up a panel in the aft fuselage and he flipped on a light – some guy had one and installed seats back here, he told me. That’d be some ride – cramped up in the tail of a fighter with a pilot who could shake things up just for fun.
The P-40 sat behind the Wildcat, another warrior pulled from grace by the sexier fighters of the late war years. I’d seen this Warhawk plenty of times before at airshows, but never knew that the Frascas owned it. David opened the canopy up and let me peek in, and I had to restrain myself from drooling. The smell was unmistakably warbird, and this was the one I’d always longed to fly. Powerful enough to go pretty fast, light enough to still be fun, the P-40 embodied all I wanted in a warbird. As I stepped from the wing, though, an odd shape caught my eye. There aren’t many ellipses in aviation, A set of Spitfire wings hung from a wall, and I had to ask. Yep. We’re working on it. A bunch of instructors from an A&P school come out to work on the sheet metal from time to time, David said.
Wow.
I was already in shock, absolutely awed by the collection. I though about asking for oxygen when he unlocked another door and led me into another hangar. An SE5A replica of the famous World War 1 fighter sat by the door, and as my eyes adjusted to the darker hangar, I gasped. Out loud. I swear.
An old beleriot-ish flying machine sat behind the SE5A, and beyond them, a silver PT-22 begged to fly. It was restored by Paul Poberezny, Mister Sport Aviaiton. A dusty chipmunk sat behind the PT-22, and beyond that, the airplanes continued. The rear wall was lined by engines of all shapes and sizes: Round, flat, Vee and inline. A couple of small homebuilts dangled from the rafters.
Beyond all I saw initially sat a T-6 in yellow, and I had to laugh as I fairly trotted around the Texan. “ I may be an airplane snob, and I hate to slight your T-6, but I know what I’m looking at on the other side,” I said. More ellipses. A couple of them stuck up over the top of the T-6, and one stuck out the side – a Spitfire Mk. 18, the Mack Daddy of all Spits. This one was actually the postwar version, with a Griffon Engine, a five-bladed prop and lines that truly made me want to climb in and start flipping switches.
“She’s a year and a half out of annual,” David told me. “We lost our mechanic, and haven’t been able to find a replacement since he left. These aren’t Cessnas and Pipers, but they’re not hard to work on – they’re still airplanes.”
I told him I could probably dig a resume out of the car. He didn’t laugh, a sign I took positively. “If the airlines don’t turn out to be all I dreamed of, I’ll give you a call,” I said.
But wait. There’s more. He made mention of another hangar with a Stearman and others. I never saw that hangar. But, he did show me a hangar with a J-3 Cub, a polished Luscombe, another Chipmunk and a Great Lakes biplane with a Ranger engine, and as in the other hangar, homebuilts hanged form the rafters. “They’re given to us by guys who’ve built them and flown them, but didn’t want the liability of selling them.
I hated to leave. I really wanted to leave my bags there, dash home for tools and logbooks, and set up shop in Frasca’s hangar. For there in the heartland of America. A family continues doing what made them famous – building simulators – and their love of flying is apparent, undiluted by money and all the other troubles of running a big business.
There in Urbana, couched on either side by corn fields, is a field of dreams for aviators.