About a month ago, I read a blog post on the Antique Airplane Association website (by the way, an OUTSTANDING site that’s always being updated with new content!) about the recent court win in an ongoing battle to obtain the Approved Type Certificate (ATC) drawings/data held by the FAA, for those restoring antique/classic aircraft – something that has been extremely restricted for no real good reason by bureaucratic red tape and Federal Agency excuse-making in my opinion.  The case stemmed from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the Fairchild 45 drawings/data by AAA Executive Director Brent Taylor that was denied by the FAA and lead to the legal action against the FAA and the now-defunct Fairchild Corporation to obtain them.  As I followed this case, it occurred to me that I had never heard of the Fairchild F-45 and it caught my interest.

A few days later, while at work, Mr. Bill Cutter brought the AAA newsletter article on the case in to me and asked me if I could check to see if the aircraft pictured in the article (s/n 4015, now owned and flown by George Riffle) was one of the F-45′s his father, William P. Cutter, operated in Albuquerque in the late 30′s and 40′s.  Evidently Cutter Flying Service was the primary Fairchild Dealership in the Southwest and William P. Cutter had quite a few Fairchilds in his logbook after a time.  Mr. Cutter even had an article written about him in the Fairchild Corporation magazine, “The Pegasus” in March 1945 about his use of Fairchild’s in the Southwest… and that article showed two photos of an F-45 he was operating at the time (click on the image at right for a PDF of the article or click this link to the article).  We later determined that the aircraft in the article was actually s/n 4011, NC16865 – but the process of looking up this limited-production, clean design, executive monoplane really got my research juices flowing.

The five-place, retractable gear Fairchild 45 first flew on May 31, 1935, powered originally by a 225 hp Jacobs L-4 radial engine.  Later production models had a more powerful 320 hp Wright R-760 radial engine instead.  Including the prototype, only 17 aircraft were constructed as the market at the time was considered to not be able to support more aggressive sales as the United States was just beginning to slowly recover from the Great Depression.  Other executive low-wing monoplanes like the Spartan Executive and Harlow PJC-2 also saw low production numbers during this time with the Spartan having only 34 produced and a mere 11 Harlow PJC-2′s produced.

Of the 17 produced, three aircraft were sold to the Honduran Air Force (s/n’s 4001, 4005, 4010) and two to the Argentine Navy (s/n’s 4007 & 4008) and another being registered in the U.S. then sold in 1937 to the South African Air Force (s/n 4002).  Another two aircraft were impressed into the US Army Air Corps as the UC-88 (s/n’s 4004 and 4013) in 1943 as General Aviation more-or-less came to a standstill during World War II.  One more F-45A was impressed into the U.S. Navy as a JK-1 in 1943 as an executive transport (s/n 4006).  This left a precious few to be sold and flown by civilian operators – and luckily Cutter Flying Service was one of them.

I was able to construct a fairly complete list of the entire production line of the Fairchild F-45 and F-45A and have created a preliminary table of them, their Civil Registrations, Serial Numbers, last known history, and if they are on the current U.S. Civil Aircraft Register. 

Click here to see that table with links to photos where I was able to find some.

Now I am just trying to determine what happened to the rest and to fill in the blanks… some of the aircraft seem to just disappear, meaning that they were destroyed, are sitting somewhere derelict, or met another fate.  ANY assistance to track these aircraft down would be wonderful… as I’d like to build a complete history of each if at all possible.

Again, visit the Fairchild F-45 & F-45A Aircraft Table here as far as I have assembled it.  Email any updates to me at keough.ryan@gmail.com or comment publicly here on this post.  Thanks!

Why only seventeen?

Hope you enjoy the chuckles… and hope they don’t hit too close to home!

THE LIST…

When your wife says your son was caught with dope and you get excited and run to the garage and turn on the lights.

When your new $25,000 truck sits outside in the snow while you protect $800 worth of wood and metal in the garage as you procrastinate in building one of your wings.

When you don’t understand why your wife is mad at you for using the master bath shower stall as a spray booth — I mean, those parts aren’t going to zinc chromate themselves!

When you’ll spend $400 on gas, three days on the road, and 30 hours sifting through a junkyard in Wyoming in the middle of winter to find three good turbocharger cores, but can’t stand waiting for more than 5 minutes holding a purse outside the dressing room at Macys

When the local stray cat goes missing, but weeks later you find him after “smelling” something in the backyard — and it take 6 hours and a 12 pack to extricate him from the pile of parts in the yard.

When you go to an airplane museum for fun and end up needing to rent a trailer to come home.

When your idea of interior design is mounting pieces of battered metal “scored” from your wreckchaser friend on the walls, and you show your wife in all seriousness that Moto Art website when she says she wants a new dining room table.

When more than 20% of your home “junk drawer” in the kitchen contains either broken clecos, AN bolts, or odd shaped hydraulic fittings.

When Lava soap replaces that Aloe and Shea Butter pump soap at your kitchen sink.

When the stack of Aircraft Spruce catalogs, Trade-a-Planes, and EAA Magazines in your bathroom is declared a piece of furniture.

When you’ve got a half-finished deck and patio out back, two-thirds of your house has been covered in Tyvek wrap for a year, and the shed out back still has a roof covered in a blue tarp, but you pride yourself in engineering and constructing a wooden rib and longeron steamer in two weekends.

When the yearly tax-return in April always seems to vanish in May when the local “fly market” happens at the local airport — I mean, where else are you going to find those fairings for that Navion you may eventually buy when the kids graduate from college?

When you are the only family for at least 400 miles that has a microfilm reader on the bureau in your bedroom.

When you become insanely jealous and wish YOU had a dry lakebed where you could horde cool stray castoff projects.

When your shop vac gets more use than the Hoover in the hall closet does.

When your digital camera has taken only about a dozen photos of your kids playing teeball, but is credited with 2000+ photos documenting your project.

When you can’t hide your stray fingernail clippings in the carpet because they are all stained black from your overzealous usage of the parts cleaner.

and that’s it! Seek help now if any of these apply…

But in an ironic turn that would only happen to me, I haven’t been able to find the time to do so BECAUSE of WordPress… or rather the fact that I have been working on two web properties for Cutter Aviation (one being the company website) using WordPress as a CMS (and a pretty heavy implementation of the Pods CMS add-on package within it, which has been an eyeopener) and around a half dozen contract web projects using WordPress that I have been dreadfully falling farther and farther behind on because my learning curve in web development has started arching the other way. At one time, I was top-of-game and making pretty and slim websites with ease… html with some graphics and a little basic CSS and, voila! But now, I am a dinosaur, roaming the web without a toolbox of knowledge on PHP, CSS, MySQL, JavaScript, and the ever-present challenge of creating hacks to make each look and act right on Internet Explorer. I experimented with reverse engineering WordPress themes and could do well enough there… but anything custom has been a killer. Well… I guess I hit the Perfect Storm because everything I have been struggling with IS custom. But instead of capsizing and taking George Clooney down to the briny deep with me, I have been slowly damaging myself with longer and longer workdays, no weekends off, and now… with the exception of this brief spell to post this… no holidays off until everything is done. And once it is, then my stress will return to a naturally mild panic level as it always has been… well, at least it has been since eighth grade math class with Mr. Zentz — I never recovered from the PTSD of those days (Post Trigonometry Stress Disorder).

And I’ve decided that after all the side jobs are done, I am closing up shop and not going to do any more contract work on the side. The money may help make ends meet, but it really hasn’t been worth it when I look at my health and happiness… there are far smarter and more fun ways to grow financially and personally (and no, that ISN’T an open invitation to anyone who wants to pitch a MLM, Get Rich Quick, yada yada scheme on me too… I already have ideas and it doesn’t involve that kind of stuff).

If I do websites, they will be for me alone and my own enjoyment… and of course, I will be working on maintaining or growing sites that are part of my job at Cutter Aviation… though I admit that I will probably be relying more and more on knowledgeable, talented and punctual professional freelance developers (like the amazing Selene M. Bowlby of idesignstudios.com who literally saved me from checking in at the local insane asylum by assisting me with the Cutter project) to get those web development goals accomplished.

I guess, in the end, I find more enjoyment out of creativity (which is one part of design) and communication (social and professional) and will be focusing more on how those two pieces can help me become a more strategic thinker and planner. I’d like to, for once, plan out campaigns for marketing channels and manage the process of implementing campaigns within each — the leader overseeing all the steps in the process from a higher level. Unfortunately it has taken me a long time to realize that the talents that have been the “differentiators” in my career — the fact that I could plan, write, design, produce, and monitor all by myself — were actually doing myself and my clients / employers a disservice. No one can do all those things and do all of them well enough to actually be that “golden employee” — at least, not for their entire career. Eventually a project will get dropped, a deadline will be missed, or an entire campaign gets ruined because one step in the critical path was skipped. And once that happens, either the employer loses trust in the “golden employee” and/or the “golden employee” cracks under the pressure to be perfect and goes into a literal motivational nosedive… losing incremental amounts of confidence in his or her talent with each thousand feet they fall. Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of my peers out there that are either there already or are headed that way. With social media and information overload, the pressure to produce is at an all time high. With tightening budgets and deadlines so “sales can meet quota before the end of the quarter” the time available to plan and test strategies is at an all time low and in many cases, you are understaffed to begin with. Then there is the ever-present pressure of the rockstars of the social media, marketing, and communications world… and the fact that you can’t show weakness because they never seem to! Their Tweets are timely and topical and you set your standards way too high because of it. I think that my generation is headed for another perfect storm… the mid-life crisis monsoon of Generation Y.

Sorry about that last bit… I guess this was more of a rant than I expected it to be! Oh well… ’til next time everyone!

Buy the film at Amazon.com by clicking on this link: One Six Right The Romance of Flying.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the film, One Six Right is something of a documentary of Van Nuys Airport – the business general aviation airport in the United States and one of the most historic airfields still in the Los Angeles area. It was created in 2005 by filmmaker Brian Terwilliger.

As Lil was using my office and the sole scanner in our household for the day in preparation for another large eBay sale today, I positioned myself in the living room with laptop and TV at the ready. Instead of watching the usual schlock of Doctor Who, Top Gear, or even (God forbid) one of those Worlds Wildest Police Videos shows in the background while I worked, I decided to take advantage of Lil’s absence and pop in the DVD of One Six Right.

Within the first ten minutes of the film, my laptop was closed, my attention was squarely on the TV and my eyes were doing that halting weepy feeling you get when bagpipes play Amazing Grace at a memorial ceremony… and that way they stayed for most of the duration of the film.

The film is breathtaking – and that is an understatement. For me, a person who considers himself pretty creative, the rich mix of beautiful cinematography, historical footage, and just the right mix of well done visual and digital effects astounded me. I absolutely loved how there was no real narrator to the film, but rather an ever-changing array of real people who were involved with the history of Van Nuys Airport from early on to today.

When the movie came out, I was still living in New Hampshire and really didn’t have an attachment or even much awareness of Van Nuys Airport. I knew it was the home of Clay Lacy Aviation and I knew of Mr. Lacy from his years of writing for Professional Pilot magazine and his history as one of the early pioneers of business aviation.

I remember being at the National Business Aviation Association convention in Orlando, FL in 2006 with my team from Daniel Webster College and seeing a faux movie theater facade installed in front of one of the meeting halls for a premiere of the film – thinking back, I should have taken advantage of that showing…

Since relocating to Arizona and visiting Los Angeles a few times, I have become a lot more familiar with Van Nuys and its role in our industry now. Working at Cutter Aviation, I see quite a few customers who originate from VNY – and many more who regularly fly in and out of there, including our own fleet.

So that made the film resonate so much more with me now. It was amazing what that little extra familiarity did to increase my enjoyment of it… “oh look, that’s (insert person here)” or “cool, that’s a T-6 from the Dawn Patrol”. It was funny how the airport, for me in this case, took on the status of the celebrity in and of itself!

The beauty of the film really struck me, and that’s what initially got me weepy; but later on it was the realization of the reality we are faced with in aviation now… that’s what really got me teary near the end.

When this film was launched, business aviation was really growing… and general aviation was growing slightly too. FBOs were busy, manufacturers were selling airplanes, and everyone was feeling good about the future. The film carried a theme of “aviation is good for the community” throughout and warned that airports were closing and threats came from the ever increasing property values around an airport, complaining neighbors, and developers who felt that a profit could be turned on land if the airport was removed and another strip mall was built up instead.

Now, only four years later, the industry is radically different. The economy is significantly down, private aviation has been vilified by our government and as a result, flight hours are down. Manufacturers and dealers are selling far fewer aircraft, if any, and maintenance providers are slow or empty without the traffic that they once enjoyed. Pilot starts are down and flight schools are closing all over – aviation as a career doesn’t hold the romance for the masses that it used to.

We all know it’s just another downturn on a cycle of business that we’ve ridden for years… another hill in the rollercoaster of capitalism. The unfortunate thing is that it’s like a rollercoaster without seatbelts… and no one knows who’ll get tossed off as it keeps speeding downhill.

So, for me, the film is something of a benchmark… a flag stuck in the ground at a certain point in our history that we can look and reminisce back to. Like the people who romantically recalled parts of the history of Van Nuys and got a twinkle in their eye that closed with a certain restrained sadness over the passage of time and the regret it could not be relived in any other way than memory; I look at the film and feel the same. Vicariously I feel sad for the passage of time and the fact that I could not have been part of their history – a history when it seemed like the sky was literally the limit and the future was bright for aviation.

I am sure it will be again, but it will be changed for sure. It’ll take time for people like me and my peers to adapt and become comfortable with it – but along the way, we’ll have movies like this to watch and reminisce. We’ll use it to live, if only for 90 minutes, back when it was all comfortable to us.

Buy the film at Amazon.com by clicking on this link: One Six Right The Romance of Flying.

Perhaps my sour opinion on cars were due to the fact I was driving a Dodge Stratus at the time — hardly a car one could ‘love’ per se.

However, over the past year, my contempt for the auto slowly turned to care as something slowly brought me around. Perhaps it was the day I caught a segment on England’s Top Gear by mistake and actually started enjoying the petrolhead banter of those smarmy Brits — so much so that I started watching it religiously. Perhaps it was the day I spent wading through Wikipedia reading up on the most basic of information on the art of motoring — allowing me to understand what a differential is, or what understeer and oversteer are, and of course, all the stuff that I could have understood about care and feeding of my car years ago if only I had paid attention to my brother.

Regardless, as the Dodge started to gasp it’s last breaths in the Fall, I started looking for it’s replacement. And dammit, I wasn’t going to get a loveless car again.

I wanted a fun car… something to take advantage of the nice weather in Arizona. I didn’t care much for practicality as Lil has the Jeep Liberty and that has enough practicality for our small family. I wanted something speedy, yet not a gas-hog… so a two-seater would be fine.

The recommendations came in… Honda S2000, Nissan 350Z, Mazda RX-8, and Mazda MX-5 Miata. The prices for the S2000 and RX-8 were a bit out of my range and the 350Z wasn’t really that nice-looking for my needs. The Miata reminded me of the British sports cars like the Triumph and the MG that I always liked, so I chose that.

Prices for Miatas were good too. I kept seeing $4k to $7k cars in on Auto Trader and other sites — a good price range for me! But I slowly began understanding why some were priced low… the harsh AZ sun wasn’t kind to the tops and interior of a lot of them… and others ran like a run-out, TBO’d Lycoming O-235 on a Fly-By-Night flight school plane. I found out that I had a task on my hands.

Eventually I came across the right car at the right price… and ironically it was at BMW of North Scottsdale — a place that you’d think wouldn’t be the first place for a deal on a used car. But they had a nice 1999 Miata in dark green (or Emerald Mica as they call it) with 55,000 miles. Nice interior, nice exterior, and a strong engine. I did a little haggling with my salesman (see John Sarno there… he’s a good guy and did right by me) and drove it off the lot a few days later thanks to a great auto loan deal from Wings Financial Credit Union.

Over the past few months I have fallen in love with driving. It’s the first standard transmission (5 speed) I’ve ever driven and I can’t imagine driving any other way. It’s quick and really fun to drive… and has made the morning commute to Sky Harbor far more enjoyable than the Dodge ever did.

But then a wayward rental car bonked into the back of her last Saturday, leaving a nasty looking scrape on her bumper and quarter panel. Though she was still fully drivable and in reality, the damage was far less than what I drove around with on the Dodge… it was just the pride and principal of the thing.

Luckily I have Progressive Insurance and the guy who hit me was the manager at the rental car place… and therefore no major headaches or delays. I could fix her right away.

So I took her to the collision shop today and dropped her off… and got a rental car for the next ten days while my baby is in the shop.

And I REALLY miss my Miata after driving this thing…

I got a Nissan Sentra as a loaner. It’s new enough and still has that new car smell, but who cares about new car smell on a boring box on wheels? It’s got lots of room… almost too much room for a sedan. My arms dangle on either side and the “well” where an arm rest should be on my right side is a gaping abyss with cupholders at the canyon floor that were obviously built for Big Gulps.

So evidently the product designers at Nissan found that the Sentra demographic have a sincere love for soft drinks I guess.

But, more than all other things missing, the two most important things missing on this Sentra that are standard on my Miata are the clutch pedal and balls.

My left foot feels extremely lonely and coming off stoplights or out of park, it stomps uselessly on the floor in search for some fun of it’s own. Now, it doesn’t get jealous of the right foot though… because the right foot really isn’t that enthralled with the lumbering lack of response when it steps on its pedal.

I just can’t go back to the lack of control that an automatic transmission seems to have. I can’t downshift, pull away, or control the engine in the ‘on-demand’ manner that the 5-speed gives me. I never thought I’d prefer a standard, but I really do!

Yes, the Sentra has the acceleration of a constipated walrus. But its actually a good thing that it doesn’t peel away from a stop like the Miata… lest my tiny body within this cavernous roadable hallway would thrash about like a “Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tube Man“.

I know that some people love big, spacious cars… and with the number of Hummers, Cadillacs, and dual-axle jacked up pickups in this state, I think Arizonans are the kings of the cavern car enthusiasts. I am far more comfortable in the tiny comfort of the Miata — with the sensation I am wearing the car, not riding upon it. I love the feeling of going over the bumps in the road and how you sense every movement in the Miata. She has an elemental feeling about her… whereas the Sentra has this complete lack of element. The Sentra has this bubble feeling about it… completely isolating the driver from the road. That may be a perk for some, but certainly not for me.

So I have ten days to tolerate this tug boat and then, thankfully, I’ll get my Miata back for some “Zoom Zoom” action again. And I can’t wait…