Business Makes Kits For Biplanes Modeled After Those of The 1930's
Article Taken From The Portsmouth Daily Times, Sunday, September 28, 2003
A double-winged airplane produced in the early 1930s by the Weaver Aircraft Company Ohio in Troy, called the Waco, was fun to fly.
The pilot, wearing helmet and goggles, looked down over barns and hayfields from an open cockpit, white scarf flying in the wind.
The company produced less than 100 Waco F-2s and F-5s, and today only a handful of them remain in flying condition. You'd have to hit the lottery big time to have enough money to pry one out of the owner's hands.
Now though, thanks to Mike Fisher and his partners, John Kennard and Ben Bagnall, there's a chance for a nostalgic return to that golden age of flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants aviation.
Their two-year-old business, WACO Aircraft Company Ohio Inc., located in Hangar No. 5 at the Greater Portsmouth Regional Airport, is producing kits for full-size, open-cockpit biplanes modeled after those famous F-series Wacos of the early 1930s.
The kits, put together with the help of a two-man crew come with the wings fully assembled, the fuselage fully welded and geared, and upholstered seats (if it's a three-passenger plane). All sheet metal is pre-fabricated and ready to attach, wires, struts, throttle--everything except the engine, propeller, instruments, fabric and pilot restraints. The kits sell for $80,000 and the plane can be ready to climb into the wild blue yonder for a total investment of about $120,000.
It can be put together for the most part in the home garage, except it will probably have to be rolled outside to attach the wings. The upper wingspan is 30 feet and the length of the plane is 22 and one-half feet.
Fisher said he liked the looks of both the Waco F-2 and F-5, so he decided to combine features from both into their new home-built design.
To provide a better look of what the finished product looks like, the company built two of the biplanes.
They're in the shop, ready to fly; ready to sell.
The one, powered by a 275 hp Jacobs engine, is priced at $165,000. It's painted in vermilion and cream, with black trim stripes edged in gold--the colors commonly used by Waco in the early 1930s.
The other, the first to be completed and equipped with a 220 hp Continental engine, is priced at $130,000.
"We have lookers from as far away as Washington State, even one from Switzerland," Kennard said in a mid-September interview at the shop. The word about WACO is getting around. We've got people coming in from somewhere out West today, flying into Lexington and renting a car to drive up here and see what we have."
He said the shop can turn out a kit every three months, a completed product every six months. The planes have a cruising speed of 110 to 120 mph and can fly for more than three hours before refueling.
Kennard said the company surprised the aviation world at the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wis., last year when he and Fisher flew the two planes in, displaying one on the flight line and the other in front of the new company's display booth for its kits.
"I flew in December and nearly froze to death," Kennard said. "Now we've installed a forced-air heater off the manifold and Mike designed a sliding canopy for the cockpit."
Fisher is no stranger to aircraft manufacturing. He designed and manufactured ultralight kits at Minford from 1982 until 1989 and lightweight experimental aircraft kits from 1990 to 1997.
He sold both of those companies and then discovered he couldn't stay away from the business.
He and Kennard and Bagnall started WACO June 1, 2001.
"Mike and I were sitting in a swing here at the airport when he came up with the idea," Kennard said.
Kennard, a retired district manager for American Electric Power in Portsmouth, has flown planes since he was 16 years old.
Bagnall is a corporate pilot with more than 8,000 flying hours and has airline transport pilot and flight instructor certificates.
"I find this (oldtime airplane kit enterprise) much more exciting than retirement," Kennard said.