Fleet Model 1 Words of Recognition
The aircraft came to be in its current form in September of 1946 when The Martins School of Aviation removed the Wright R975-E3 engine from a BT-15 and replaced it with a Pratt and Whitney R-985-E2 engine while adding a two-position propeller, changing the fuel system to gravity feed and increasing fuel tank capacity to 30 gallons. Later Floyd M. Wardlow replaced the Pratt E2 with a Pratt AN1 engine.
The most recent restoration of NC 12311 begins with its purchase by Bernard Mueck of Mueck Brothers in Marysville, California on February 25, 1992. But that wasn’t the beginning of Ben’s story. He’d owned it for forty years, buying it in 1952 after encountering it a year earlier when it landed in Marysville, California. Unfortunately, not long after that a freak windstorm flipped the plane on its back and it was seemingly the end. Ben’s story of ownership and restoration is detailed by him in the “Travel Air Log” of March 2006 some fifty-four years later. You can find that here.
The restoration was started in 1998 and, though it was “finished” and flew in 2006 it had more work to be done before Steve Thomas flew it in 2018 after still more restoration work by Ron Rippon.
Back to Ben’s story. He had a lot of help from Milt Cheney who had worked on Travel Air airplanes for over thirty years. But he also had a lot of help from renowned antique restoration expert and educator Bob Lock. Bob had a lot to do with the rebuilding of the fuselage in his shop in California during the 1990s and helped his friend Dick Hansen in Fresno build and cover the wings and tail section. Eventually, the project was moved to northern California where it was recovered by Thomas Louden in June of 2005 and substantially completed with new avionics by March of 2006.
Then in January of 2012, Ron Rippon of Rockford, Illinois purchased the plane intending to fly it home. While it may have been airworthy his friend Steve Thomas of Poplar Grove Airport in Illinois finally convinced him that an eighty-year-old man flying across the Rockies in mid-winter in an open cockpit biplane, while daring and adventurous, was also foolhardy. Steve organized a group of antique enthusiasts, including his San Francisco based son, to gather to take the airplane apart and truck it back to Rockford.
A video of that effort can be found here:
After Ron Rippon got the airplane home, he decided that there were additional repairs necessary and he and friends set to work. Before completing his work Mr. Rippon passed away and the plane was purchased by Steve Thomas and moved to Poplar Grove Airport. Steve made the first flight in NC 12311 in July of 2018 marking the end of its restoration.
Since Steve’s 2018 flight the engine was discovered to be making metal and was sent to Tulsa Airmotive for an IRAN inspection and the propeller and hub was overhauled.
