CAA: GA News, "Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines"

["Stephen Irwin" <stepheni@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines
By Brigid McMenamin 
Forbes Magazine


The warplanes of World War II live on at a little airport near Virginia
Beach. 

Every day sleek U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets pierce the sky
over Virginia Beach, Virginia, the home of Air Station Oceana. So
dazzling are the jets that you might not notice one of their ancestors
creeping along the horizon: a propeller-driven Spitfire, of the kind
that defended England against the Luftwaffe in World War II. The antique
belongs to Gerald Yagen, the ceo of Tidewater Tech vocational schools,
who collects World War II warbirds in a hangar at nearby Suffolk
Airport. 

Yagen loves these old geezers, though at 56 he's too young to remember
the war and has never even served in the military. "It's the joy of
being able to fly the aircraft," he says, recalling a September
afternoon in his TBM Avenger, the same type of torpedo dive-bomber
former President George Bush was flying when he was shot down over the
Pacific. Anybody can drive a Ferrari, he says, but "not everyone can
land a Corsair on a narrow runway." 

The Virginia native started collecting World War II aircraft in 1994,
partly as a way to lure students into an aviation maintenance program at
one of his 14 Tidewater Tech schools. A third of Yagen's 3,000 students
take courses related to aviation. 

Yagen's collection of 15 flightworthy WWII planes isn't the biggest of
its kind nor the most valuable. The Commemorative Air Force in Midland,
Texas (known until last year as the Confederate Air Force), has 145
World War II planes; the Smithsonian, 84. Kermit Weeks, a private
collector, has 27 in Polk City, Florida, part of a diverse aircraft
collection worth maybe $40 million. But Yagen's is the only one that
plays a practical role in a profitmaking business. 

When Yagen started out collecting, he bought wrecks and fixed them up,
thinking that it would be cheaper than buying restored planes.
Experience has taught him otherwise. First he bought a Curtiss P-40E
Warhawk that the Russians lost fighting the Nazis near Norway. Its
condition: "Like dropping a car from a thousand feet, then leaving it
out for 50 years to rust." To restore it he cannibalized parts from four
other wrecks. Restoring a B-25J bomber has proved similarly taxing. Four
years and $600,000 later, Yagen says, "I could have gone out and bought
one [intact] for $400,000." 

He now prefers to buy planes already airworthy--"unless it is a very
rare, one-of-a-kind aircraft." Like, for instance, his 1939
Messerschmitt BF-109E-7, which he is restoring in Eastern Europe. The
single-seat fighter was one fine machine in the 1930s, with its
stressed-skin design and retractable landing gear. 

Hunting for such rarities can be a full-time job, and until recently
Yagen kept a retired U.S. Army Ranger on staff to search for wrecks. Now
he does it himself, helped by a network of freelancers around the world.
He runs newspaper ads aimed at anybody who might have seen a plane go
down in the 1940s. 

Yagen likes to focus searches on remote lands ruled by
dictators--Myanmar, for example--where scared locals are apt to let
planes sit unmolested for decades. Even better are dictatorships in dry
lands, where wrecks are less likely to rust or rot. Libya, he says, is a
terrific place to look for airplanes. 

In Russia a collector has to pay $10,000 to $15,000 just for export
permits. And three Russian historians must certify that the plane has no
historic value. The only reason Yagen got to export a Russian-made
Lavochkin V from Ukraine was that, after communism's collapse, the
region ceased to be a part of Russia. "I think it's the only Lavochkin V
that survived the war," he says. The Germans, by contrast, are quick to
part with aircraft that if slathered with swastikas, cannot be displayed
anyway: "It's an embarrassment to them." 

Yagen just spent $60,000 to overhaul the engine on his Hurricane; he
figures that he spends at least $1 million a year to maintain his
planes. Nearly $100,000 of that goes to insurance. Flights, he figures,
cost $1,000 an hour. 

The most Yagen ever spent on a plane was $900,000 for a 1943 Vickers
Supermarine Spitfire Mark IX, mass-produced in England in 1943 for
$64,000 a copy. Light and nimble, it flew 15 sorties in Italy and was
caught on color film in Corsica by William Wyler, who directed The Best
Years of Our Lives. Later it wound up in the Israeli Air Force, which
left it derelict in a playground to tempt children to become pilots. A
collector bought it and sold it to Frederick Smith, the founder of
Federal Express, who renovated it and sold it to the man who sold it to
Yagen. 

The plane Yagen prizes most is a 1943 Hurricane Mk XII-B, which sat on a
farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, from 1948 to 1965. There are only eight
flying in the world, he thinks. 

Along with planes, Yagen has picked up other period pieces; they include
a German V-1 flying bomb--the original cruise missile. Its popping
ramjet engine caused its victims, the British, to dub these missiles
"buzz bombs." In 1944 and 1945 the Germans sent 9,251 sputtering across
the Channel. "It has all the internal guidance systems and everything,"
he says. "We got the engine started, but we couldn't get it to keep
running." A special challenge, then, for some eager young mechanic. 


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