| BOB DEMPSTER was up to his elbows in varnish inside a busy Renton Airport hangar, surrounded by ancient engine parts and sketchy, decades-old drawings, when we began our semantic discussion.
He's spent the last eight years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a quest to re-create the first around-the-world flight, starting by building — from scratch — a 1924 plane.
It's involved hundreds of hours of research, including harrowing trips to an Alaskan mountainside to scrounge for rusty pieces of the Douglas World Cruiser, one of four, that crashed there.
With a cast of talented volunteers, he's cut and glued together thousands of tiny pieces of spruce, mahogany and birch to make ribs for the plane's huge wings, and spent many hours fundraising and cajoling skilled crafts workers into fabricating key fittings. To pay the bills, he and his wife have mortgaged their condo to the hilt and have put it on the market.
Is he "obsessed"?
Dempster wouldn't say so. That word implies bad side effects, and he's having the time of his life.
"Actually, if a person works on a project a long time, he's considered 'dedicated,' " offers this 64-year-old former teacher with a wry grin.
"If he works on it a really long time, he moves into the 'eccentric' category. At this moment, I'm walking the fine line."
CALL IT WHAT you will — infatuation, fascination, preoccupation — it isn't unique to Dempster. The Pacific Northwest has long been a locus for those with a passion for aircraft. Despite our frequent rain, Washington ranks fourth in the country in number of private planes, behind California, Texas and Florida, and fourth in number of private pilots.
Some airplane aficionados like 'em big: The all-new Boeing 787 Dreamliner has continued to draw crowds to gawk from nearly a half-mile away as it languishes on the tarmac at Everett's Paine Field.
Liz Matzelle, a 27-year-old aerospace-engineering-school dropout, has spent hundreds of hours over the past year in her rusty Dodge Caravan, parked in a lot across from the runway, a powerful digital camera ready to document any tiny change.
"It's coming from a bunch of parts made in Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia — all over the globe," says Matzelle. "Bundles of shrink-wrapped parts becoming an actual living, breathing, flying airplane. It's just so cool."
Other airplane enthusiasts like 'em small: Many build tiny airplanes in their garages, hangars or spare rooms. Mike Sabourin, a Boeing systems engineer, built sections of his foam-and-fiberglass Long EZ, a fast two-seater, in an upstairs room of his South Burien home. For final assembly, he had to angle pieces through a window and down a ladder.
Still others are fascinated with the new, such as Ben Ellison's "better mousetrap" — a unique "flying boat" named Gweduck, which first skated across Lake Washington and into the air in May.
Last — but definitely not least — are those who hunger for the old, such as Dempster's Cruiser.
Or planes like the 1927 Travel Air, a deep-blue, open-cockpit biplane with huge red wings lovingly restored by Lee Oman, pilot and mechanic for Ken Horwitz's Olde Thyme Aviation, a commercial plane-ride operation outside the Museum of Flight near Boeing Field.
Oman's now building a Gee Bee, a radial-engine craft that broke a world speed record in 1932, soon had two fatal crashes and was never rebuilt. Like some musicians play by ear, Oman is building by eye, without plans but with a skilled craftsman's finely tuned abilities. An air-show racer, he plans to capitalize on the plane's past: "I'm flying one of the world's most dangerous airplanes!"
Others concentrate on saving aviation history.
Bob Bogash, a retired Boeing quality-assurance director, has recently managed a project to secure for the Museum of Flight a 1940s-era Lockheed Constellation, whose curvaceous beauty still inspires. "She's 70 years old and she's still gorgeous," he says.
His latest project: Rescue the Boeing 314 Honolulu Clipper, the luxurious, 1930s-era flying boat depicted in romantic posters, from the bottom of the ocean where it sank in 1945. Such aircraft are like Beethoven's Fifth or the Mona Lisa, he says. "They deserve to be preserved; otherwise, they all become beer cans; otherwise, there's nothing left but pictures."
The project could cost $10 million, but he's undaunted.
"I'm telling you straight out, sometimes you just gotta do things. I'm a man on a mission."
Even so, Bogash, who spent 19 years acquiring a Concorde for the museum, knows how airplane projects can eat up the years.
Ellison's drive to build a land-and-sea plane able to stave off saltwater corrosion has taken him nearly 20 years.
"I'm an old man now," says the 68-year-old, whose energy and zeal belie his self-description. Still, he claims he might have lost interest but for the flock of younger Gweduck enthusiasts.
"I've always had help," he says. "There's always another airplane nut around."
SKIPPING THE nature-nurture question, it's safe to say many "airplane nuts" fell from the many branches of aircraft-manufacturing companies, including our own Big One.
You imagine them stuck inside vast gray buildings for years, laboring at computers and assemblies while others soar above their heads.
Tantalized daily by tales of flight, the mysteries of space and the gravity-defying machines they design and build, one day they just can't stand it any more and have to have one, like a dieter living downwind from Reese's finally succumbing to the seductive aroma of peanut butter and chocolate.
Michael Lombardi, corporate historian for The Boeing Co., says a lot of aviation-minded people moved into the area in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. "The Northwest is such a wonderful place to live, they stayed."
The region is unique in the country, says Bonnie Dunbar, president of the Museum of Flight, in its mix of aerospace industry with research.
For many of the engineers attracted by this combination, sheer curiosity drives them into a personal relationship with an airplane, says Ron Wanttaja, a Boeing rocket engineer and newsletter editor for the Experimental Aircraft Association's local chapter. "I know how a car works, how a boat works, but how does that damn big piece of metal stay in the air?"
Once into their own projects, it's kid-in-a-candy-shop stuff, engineer-style. "The engineering we do here you can't do for a big company," says Ellison, a former propulsion engineer. "There, you end up designing a toilet hinge or something."
In Boeing's shadow, untold influences began working their way into the psyches of innocent children and unsuspecting bystanders. Who knows how nascent neuron pathways were shaped by the propensities of mechanically and spatially-inclined Boeing-worker parents — or by the omnipresent sights and sounds of airplanes?
"Born and raised here with Boeing, you were always looking up at airplanes," says Dave Nason, a 62-year-old homebuilder who lives at Kent's Crest Air Park. Nason, with his brother, bought his first plane at 19. Now he has four.
Diane Dempster, World Cruiser Bob's wife, grew up south of Seattle, where the roar overhead often cut conversations short. Her first word, her mother swears, was "ehwpwane."
The first time she stepped into an airplane, Diane recalled, "I thought: 'This is where I am meant to be.' "
Later, she studied aviation electronics, became a pilot, landed a job as an electronics technician for the 737, then hatched a plan — and nearly accomplished it — with her husband to fly around the world in a tiny Piper Super Cub.
Bits and pieces of stories can plant seeds: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen credits his dad's World War II service for his awesome effort to save warbirds from extinction.
Ellison grew up among pilots in Normandy Park. He was just 15 when Alvin "Tex" Johnston, a Boeing test pilot, barrel-rolled the 707 prototype over Lake Washington in 1955, a move that shocked the crowd and continues to thrill. The video on YouTube inspired this review: "What balls."
Such was heady stuff for a young man. At 16, without his parents knowing, he got his pilot's license, and took friends up when they could raise enough cash to rent a plane. Once, a friend brought a bag of used hacksaw blades, which they dumped over McNeil Island Penitentiary, Ellison confessed.
Ellison, owner of an aircraft fuel-injector company, says he hopes Gweduck will go into production and make him some money. "I'm a damn capitalist," he says.
Like many of his fellow "airplane nuts," he's also smart, funny and quirky. They dance to their own tunes.
Asked why they do it, the Gweduckers chuckle.
"None of us knows why," Ellison answers. "It's a passion."
AS WITH ANY love, there can be pain.
Since most amateur airplane builders are male, the joke goes something like this:
"How much did that airplane cost you to build?"
"Twenty thousand and Linda."
It doesn't always go that way.
Sabourin's plane became an 11-year family project: His daughters helped with sanding, and his wife designed the color scheme that helped their plane become 1996 Arlington Fly-in Plans-Built Grand Champion.
Diane Dempster, who was Bob's navigator and co-pilot on their attempt to fly around the world and many other adventures, has been co-conspirator on the World Cruiser project.
Nason, who finished building an Italian-designed Falco in 1999, says his wife is "one of my best supporters."
But divorce isn't the only risk. Amateur-built airplanes crash about 15 percent more often than "production" aircraft, Wanttaja found after reviewing statistics.
Like others, the experimental-airplane newsletter editor discounts the risks. That morning, he whizzed down I-5, two feet away from an 18-wheeler, he recalls. If the driver had sneezed, he could be dead. On the ground, cars come from nowhere, but midair collisions are extremely rare.
"Flying," he says, "is one of the few times I feel safe."
TO BE ABLE to pull your own puppet-strings of fate is not-so-strangely attractive to these aeronauts.
"Flying is freedom," Wanttaja says. "Once you're in an airplane, your entire fate is in your own hands."
He's not the first to say that, nor the first to rhapsodize about flight.
Historian Lombardi often muses: "Here you have this machine, weighing tens of thousands of pounds, and yet it's just floating on the air. Two hundred years ago, people would have looked at this as magic, and it really is."
Airplanes aren't like telephones or washing machines, insists Bogash. "They move under their own power, go interesting places, through storms and night and carry all sorts of people. I think they're alive — they have souls and spirits, and if you fly them, you find they really do."
Matzelle, the 787-watcher, couldn't agree more. "Airplanes are one of the few creations of man that have a life of their own."
On a recent windy day, Matzelle steadied her camera on the grassy hillside near Paine Field, conversation interrupted by the clatter of airplane engines and chatter from her two scanners. She's taught herself photography, computer programming, and enough aviation technology to decipher activities around the plane and decode the jargon she overhears.
Matzelle says she's been in the thrall of airplanes since she was a toddler, flying with her dad, a private-plane pilot. In Pennsylvania, "sitting out on a summer evening watching planes take off and land was just what we did."
After living in Florida, hating the flatness and unchanging seasons, she moved here five years ago when a friend offered a plane ticket.
Although she loves military "warbirds" the most, she says she can't pass up the 787. "The chance to see a brand new airplane, completely new from the ground up being developed and tested, is something that happens every 20 or 30 years." She's been taking pictures of the 787 for about a year, publishing some on the Web. In May, she lost her IT job at Boeing after she snapped photos of the 787 through an open door at the factory. "I never meant to cause (Boeing) any headaches," she says. "I didn't figure I was doing anything wrong."
Now, she can spend even more hours on the grassy hillside or in her van. While she waits, she's writing code to create an iPhone "app" to help identify airplanes. When she can afford it, Matzelle wants to get her pilot's license and return to aerospace-engineering school.
This 27-year-old may be an anomaly, say observers concerned about dwindling interest in aviation.
"As kids, we grew up building models, going to airshows," says Lombardi. "I don't see as much of that today." Without the Apollo program or the first moonwalk, "We don't really have anything that captures the imagination."
Dunbar, a pilot and five-time spaceflight veteran, sees this as her new mission.
"Air and space is a way of finding your own frontiers. It's about inspiring kids to have a dream; if you can get them to dream and have a vision, then the rest will fall into place."
Dempster wouldn't argue with that. Building a replica of the World Cruiser isn't significant in itself, he says. What is significant is the original feat, as monumental in its time as going to the moon.
Always the teacher, Dempster tells kids about persistence and the value of a single step.
"You'll never know what you can do if you don't try," he says. "Everything in life is like building that wing rib — it starts with pieces, and then it goes from there."
Carol M. Ostrom is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer. |
