Gonna set my heart at ease
Gonna make a sentimental journey
To renew old memories
- Sentimental Journey, by Les Brown, Bud Green, and Ben Horner
April Fools Gags for Government Bureaucracies
On April Fools Day 2023, my third class medical medical certificate will turn into a pumpkin. OK, not a literal pumpkin, but it will no longer grant legal authority for me to exercise my pilot privileges because it will be expired. Since I was placed on a special issuance over a decade ago, my medical certificates are only valid for a year at a time and require annual updates to the FAA for renewal. This year, the bureaucracy has been slower than usual to issue a new certificate. Maybe there is an ink shortage for rubber stamps.
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| William T. Piper Memorial Airport in Lock Haven, PA. |
In anticipation of this, I took advantage of nice weather on March 30 to get in a final flight before starting an indeterminate hiatus from the sky. I considered a number of activities from an instrument currency flight to visiting a museum. In the process, I ruled out most of my own ideas except for one that stuck: visiting the Piper Aviation Museum on the field at William T. Piper Memorial Airport in Lock Haven, PA.
How an Oil Man Became the Henry Ford of the Sky
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| A surviving example of a Taylor Brothers Chummy hanging from the terminal ceiling in Rochester, NY. |
The story of Piper Aircraft does not actually begin with anyone named Piper, but rather Clarence (Gilbert) and Gordon Taylor from Rochester, NY who founded the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation in 1927. Their aircraft design was called the "Chummy", a high wing, side-by-side two-seater with a radial engine. Despite its amiable moniker, the prototype killed Gordon Taylor during a demonstration flight at Ford Airport in Dearborn, MI. Gilbert was lured from Rochester to Bradford, PA in 1928 by a group of investors that included oil man William T. Piper, but the pricey Chummy failed to garner sufficient sales during the Great Depression. Piper bought the bankrupt company in 1930 and pressured Gilbert to build simpler aircraft affordable to more people. Gilbert fled his contentious relationship with Bill Piper in 1935 by exiting the company and founding a separate firm called Taylorcraft Aviation. Two years later, Piper rebranded the former Taylor Aircraft to the Piper Aircraft Corporation. Decimation of the Bradford factory by fire in 1937 led Piper to relocate to Lock Haven, PA where an abandoned silk mill adjacent to an airport offered ample space to build airplanes. Shortly after moving to Lock Haven, Piper produced a refined version of the Taylor J-2 Cub that became the iconic Piper J-3 Cub. Painted yellow for high visibility, the plane was simple, affordable, and pleasant to fly. Piper had a hit on their hands and produced roughly 20,000 of the tube and rag high wing aircraft. It was an airplane for everyone, a Model T of the sky.
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| An example of a 1946 Piper J-3 Cub, the one I flew to earn a tailwheel endorsement in 2017. |
Ten Years Gone
| Date | Aircraft | Route of Flight | Time (hrs) | Total (hrs) |
| 30Mar 2023 | N21481 | SDC (Sodus, NY) - LHV (Lock Haven, PA) - SDC | 3.0 | 2600.2 |
Ten years passed since my last flight to Lock Haven for a visit to the Piper Aviation Museum (Escape To Lock Haven). I knew from social media that the museum continued to grow during that time and I was excited to see those developments.
Despite the splendor of the day, the skies were surprisingly unpopulated and the airwaves quiet. Though surface winds at Lock Haven were reportedly light, the air at 8,500 feet sped across the terrain at 40+ knots and I wondered how much abuse I would take on the descent into the Susquehanna River valley and Lock Haven. An earlier PIREP (pilot report) from a Cessna 182 reported moderate to severe turbulence at 4,500 feet over south central Pennsylvania, but its relevance to my flight was unclear.
Lock Haven and the William T. Piper Memorial Airport lie in the Susquehanna River valley at the base of a ridgeline extending eastward to Williamsport. Local terrain bent the winds aggressively toward my descending Warrior, but the air largely calmed once below the elevation of the hilltops. I made a smooth landing in minimal wind on runway 27R and taxied to parking in front of the museum at the southwest corner of the field.
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| Warrior 481 with the Piper Aviation Museum in the background. |
Past Acquaintances
The Piper Aviation Museum occupies the former Piper engineering building where many of Piper's designs beginning with the J-3 were first committed to paper. It is not a fancy museum like the Beechcraft Heritage Museum in Tullahoma, TN. But it is a scrappy, homegrown kind of place funded more by enthusiastic volunteerism than corporate dollars.
Inside the vestibule was a sizable scale model of a Cherokee C. (As in, "C with your eyes, not your hands!") I wondered if it was a remote control.
Proper entrance to the museum is on the second floor as indicated by Piper's Cub mascot. Cuddly and helpful, a powerful combination.
I knew that my timing was poor. I arrived shortly after 3:00 pm and the official closing time was 4:00 pm. "I see that you flew-in," Ed said in greeting. "I'll stay as long as you want, it's going to be a late night for me anyway." He proceeded to give me an excellent personalized tour of the facility with little regard for the clock.
Halfway through the tour, I embarrassed to realize that my tour guide was Ed Watson, former airport manager and general aviation booster whom I had met a few times between 2007 and 2008 while he was in his prior role. Ed's presence was one of the reasons I always enjoyed flying into Lock Haven in the past and I was glad to see him so involved with the museum.
New Displays
The display area on the second floor had been refined and updated since 2013. Here, Ed showed me an example of a RON (Remain Overnight) kit that Piper provided to new aircraft owners back in the day. The zippered satchel contained everything a stranded aviator might need, right down to the Pepsodent toothpaste. (Cell phone not included.) We talked about the 63 Piper Cubs given away during the weekly "Wings of Destiny" radio show in the 1940s and sponsored by Wings Cigarettes ("The 10 cent cigarette with 15 cent flavor!"), the intrepid pilots who ferried new aircraft to customers from the Lock Haven factory, and the resourceful Piper engineer who turned scrap aluminum discs -- formed by punching out wing rib lightening holes -- into custom Piper Aircraft ashtrays. Given the modern era, Ed's thought was to convert them into Christmas tree ornaments.
A Random Walk through Piper History
This pristine 1962 PA-22-108 Piper Colt, a flapless, two seat variant of the Tri-Pacer, arrived in May 2022 and is displayed in the same condition in which it arrived.
According to Ed, this well preserved Link IFR trainer (Binghamton, NY) is actually still functional, though no one operates it anymore for fear of breaking it. I suppose that "keep 'em flying" is an odd sentiment for a WWII era electromechanical simulator!
The PA-15 Vagabond is widely credited with saving Piper from bankruptcy post World War II. It featured two seats positioned side-by-side in a new fuselage design, but otherwise leveraged a lot of components from the J-3 Cub such as the wing, though that was shortened to save costs. Another cost saving measure was a lack of suspension. Ed indicated that underinflating the tires led to a less uncomfortable taxi.
Mr. Piper Goes to War
During World War II, Piper produced the L-4 for military observation and VIP transport. I had to smile when Ed told me the tale of an L-4 pilot bringing down a Storch (a similarly equipped German liaison aircraft) with his sidearm. It was the same story I used to tell my tour groups about the L-4 at the Air Zoo.
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| Nose to nose with a J-2 Cub, the immediate forerunner to the classic J-3. |
Iconic
From above, it is easy to see how narrow the tandem-seat J-3 Cub actually is.
The J-3 Cub is so iconic, so important to the region and its economy, that it was christened the official airplane of the State of Pennsylvania. The former owner of this particular Cub named it "Happy Days" because any day spent flying was a happy one.
Considering its importance to aviation history in general and Piper history in particular, it is not surprising that the museum has more than one J-3 example on display.
Some of them even lacked skin. The lovable Cub does not look like much when fully undressed.
Earthrounder
Between August 9 and December 10, 1947, USAFR officers Clifford Evans and George Truman flew around the world in a pair of PA-12 Super Cruisers, The City of Washington and The City of the Angels. Covering nearly 20,000 nautical miles in what were essentially souped-up Cubs, the adventure marked the first flight around the world made by light personal aircraft. On display at the Piper Aviation Museum is The City of the Angels. Its companion Super Cruiser hangs in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.
The route taken by the aircraft is meticulously hand-painted on the side of the fuselage.
Single Seat Adventures
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| Undated photo of the Piper Skycycle prototype in flight. Attribution unknown. |
A post-World War II Piper design was the PA-8 Skycycle, a single seat aircraft with well-regarded flight characteristics. Although the design never advanced to production, 15 year-old Bob Erdman saw the original prototype Skycycle hanging in a Wisconsin department store and became enamored with it. After retiring from a career in the aviation industry, he endeavored to build his own carefully-researched version.
Unfinished, the project was donated to the Piper Aviation Museum in 2020 by Erdman's son. Bob Erdman was 89 years old at the time of the donation. Neither of the two Piper Skycycle prototypes survived to the modern era, making Erdman's reproduction a precious commodity.
The museum has partnered with the Pennsylvania College of Technology where students are actively working to finish Edman's Skycycle project.
The core of the fuselage was designed around a World War II Corsair drop tank. Waste not, want not.
The Flying Milk Stool
I am certain that Ed, as a former PA-22 Tri-Pacer owner, would balk at the common, but unflattering nickname for Piper's first tricycle gear aircraft. This 1958 Tri-Pacer is still flown by the museum (often by Ed) for Young Eagle flights. Its prior owners support continued airworthiness by generously subsidizing aircraft maintenance so that the museum can afford to keep it flying.
Military Aspirations
Piper even embarked on creating a World War II-era military primary trainer, the PT-1. It was Piper's first foray into building low wing aircraft and, although the design never earned any military orders, the experience gained surely influenced Piper's later low wing designs.
Egalitarian Seating
Introduced in 1938, the J-4 Cub was meant to compete with side-by-side aircraft seating designs from Taylorcraft and thus featured a wider fuselage and doors on both sides of the airplane.
A Fire Breathing Beast
In 2017, the museum took ownership of the first PA-24-400 Comanche ever produced. The Comanche was always a sleek, elegant, and fast single engine aircraft. Original PA-24s from 1956 were equipped with a 180 horsepower engine, but progressively higher output powerplants were swapped in over time. This culminated in 1966's Comanche 400 that featured a specially-designed, eight cylinder, horizontally-opposed Lycoming delivering 400 horsepower. Only 148 were ever built.
Seeing so many valve covers in a row on an otherwise conventional-looking single engine airplane is absolutely staggering.
All Original
This 1953 PA-22 Tri-Pacer is all original, from the fabric skin to the paint to the vintage instrument panel with its coffee-grinder radio. Just like grandpa used to fly. (I mean, not my grandpa, but surely someone's...)
Under Pressure
In 1974, Piper experimented with pressurizing the PA-41 Aztec. Because that effort never culminated in a commercially-viable aircraft, this is the sole example of a PA-41P.
A Diamond in the Rough
Not long after introduction of the PA-28 Cherokee (from which Warrior 481 is descended), Piper experimented with a two-seat trainer airplane made of fiberglass. The PA-29 Papoose was intended to be inexpensive to build for better accessibility to flight schools. First flown in 1962, proof of concept was established, but various design changes led to an aircraft that was undesirably heavy and the program was terminated. The wing skin was created by sandwiching resin-soaked hexagonal Kraft paper between sheets of fiberglass. Interior illumination allows museum visitors to visualize the honeycomb pattern underlying the skin. Unlike a conventional metal wing, the fiberglass wing of the PA-29 does not possess any internal structural ribs along the chord line.
Ed fired up the old beacon from the Lock Haven airport with a warning not to look directly at it. I can no longer recall the wattage of the lamp inside, but I remember feeling the heat from it on my face almost instantly. When the rotating beacon swept across me, it was like standing three feet away from the cab of a lighthouse.
More Allusions to Henry Ford
Piper mimicked Ford's assembly line concept by hanging fuselages from repurposed barn door rails to slide them from station to station within the factory. Here, a portion of a Cub fuselage hangs from a section of the original overhead assembly line track that once filled the Lock Haven factory.
Departure for Home
Ed was kind enough to stay over 30 minutes past closing so that I could see the entire museum. When I was done, I taxied the Warrior to the other side of the airport for fuel ($5.75/gal). I parked in front of the FBO fifteen minutes prior to the facility's closing time.
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| Warrior 481 on the FBO ramp in Lock Haven. |
The City of Lock Haven FBO occupies the old Piper hangars that still carry the red and blue Piper graphics from bygone decades.
Signs like this are present in airport men's rooms all across the country, but I believe that this was the first example I ever encountered.
After departure, I climbed to 3,000 and flew back over the airport to observe the Susquehanna River, Great Island (that's the name, but it doesn't look particularly great to me), and the former Piper factory (long white roofs at the bottom of frame). Although Piper significantly added to the original structure, it is amazing that the facility began life as a silk mill. Sadly, flooding from the Susquehanna ultimately drove Piper to other locations (primarily Vero Beach, Florida where Warrior 481 was born) and the abandoned factory is crumbling into a state of disrepair.
I proceeded home over the desolate terrain of central Pennsylvania at 7,500 feet. At some point, air traffic control upgraded me to a Saratoga and I began to feel almost as cool as Jeff F.
The evening sun blazed down out of the west in a sky utterly unblemished by clouds.
In addition to the usual things, my dual G5 set-up told me that there was a serious crosswind of 43 knots at my altitude (hence the 20° crab angle I was flying), that my ground speed was taking a 10 knot hit as a result, and that I really need to dust the interior of my airplane. Because I was lazy on the southbound flight and used HAL to fly the plane, I kept the autopilot off and hand flew the route home.
Even on shorter trips, reaching the Finger Lakes (in this case, Keuka) marks the beginning of the home stretch. I confessed to Rochester Approach that I was not, in fact, a Saratoga and set about planning my approach and landing.
Final Thoughts
Not that I expected to have a mediocre day in the sky, but I found the afternoon to be deeply satisfying due to a reasonably nice day to fly (with a few bumps here and there), a long-overdue return to a favorite airport, a reunion with Ed whom I've always admired for his support of aviation and aviators, and an opportunity to see how the Piper Museum has advanced over the last decade. I even learned new things on Ed's tour!
If I have to take a break from flying while my paperwork chugs through the FAA bureaucracy, at least I have the wonderful memory of this day to sustain me.