AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2019 - 62

MCBRYAN ADDRESSES A CROWD of about

1,000 that turned out for the first flight
(left). Ancient vacuum lines in the nose are
replaced (right); Normand Denis touches
up the invasion stripes (far right); Benjamin
Tessier helps reinstall the tail cone (bottom
far right); Laurie Breton cleans the number
2 propeller after replacing a seal. The rudder remained green because it is a spare
from the Buffalo Airways inventory and
may eventually go on a Buffalo DC-3.

In early January the airplane had no
engines; the roof hatch was missing, the
hamburger door was gone. A wing tip was
badly scraped; fabric on the ailerons and
rudder was shredded; there was no elevator. The cockpit was stripped, and birds
had nested where the overhead panels
should be. The flaps and fuel tanks, however, looked good.
"She'll fly again," Ronny McBryan said
confidently. "We can make her fly."
'IT'S COME ALIVE'

Fast forward to June 5. First flight is less
than 36 hours away. Beneath the fuselage,
Normand Denis of Repentigny, Quebec,
applies touch-up paint. He flew as a bush
pilot until August 1989. "Since I'm retired,
it's a perfect opportunity," he said, "even
though I really should be home right now,
painting my house."
McBryan didn't plan to repaint the DC-3,
but Heidorn felt strongly that it needed to be
done-and did a lot of it herself, with rollers and brushes. "It was simply necessary,"
she said; the striping, including the nose, was
freehand. DTD wears its Transport Canada
scheme, with RCAF roundels to honor its
military service and invasion stripes commemorating its D-Day role.
"It's unbelievable, honestly," said Fred
Morin, an avionics instructor at École
Nationale d'Aérotechnique (ENA), located
on the field. "It was a wreck just a couple
62 | AOPA PILOT August 2019

of months ago. Nobody believed that it had
any useful life-now it's come alive. It has
a personality." Students would see him in
a YouTube episode and stop him in the
hallways. "They would ask, 'Can we get
involved?"
"This is a truly magical thing that happened, something you couldn't write,"
McBryan said. "The biggest surprise to
me out of this whole project is the school.
ENA is the biggest aviation school in the
world and just by luck, you can literally hit
it with a football from where the airplane
is sitting." Without the school's support, he
said, the flight would not have happened
on schedule. "I can't sing the praises of
the school enough, but it was out of pure
luck that the school was next to us" (see
"Perfectly Located," on p. 65).
"Buffalo" Joe McBryan, owner of
Buffalo Airways and Mikey McBryan's
father, will pilot the first flight. At 5:45 p.m.,
co-pilot Quinn Jones arrives after battling
the notorious Montreal traffic. The airline
pilot's first pilot job was flying DC-3s for
Buffalo Airways. And his late grandfather,
John H. Jones-who earned Canadian air
transport license number 56-had flown
this airplane for Trans-Canada Air Lines.
That evening McBryan is sitting in an
ENA classroom, editing Episode 155, and
there's a knock on the door. Patti Hamilton
and her husband, Andre, have driven six
hours from St. Stephen, New Brunswick, to

see tomorrow's flight. "Every night we watch
it in New Brunswick and we just arrived," she
said. "I can't believe this. This is amazing."
"That's the power of this," McBryan says
later. "It's not a million-dollar show, it's not
a team of producers." The story's soul is in
the YouTube viewers' comments, he adds.
HIGHER POWER

June 6 dawns gorgeous and stays that way,
in stark contrast to this project's many cold,
cloudy days. "This is one of the nicest days
we've had," McBryan observes. "It really
makes me believe in a higher power."
"The tailcone has issues," says Benjamin
Tessier, who has one year left in the ENA
program. A replacement tailcone-the original had disappeared-had been on and off
the airframe many times. Missing doublers
weren't discovered until the final inspection; they're promptly added.
Tessier received a speeding ticket bringing a pizza lunch to the crew. Someone
asks Ronny McBryan how many slices of
pizza he's had since the project started.
"One hundred and forty-eight," he replies.
Tessier's been offered a summer apprenticeship with Buffalo Airways.
William Levacher just graduated from
ENA as an avionics technician. He's worked at
least three hours each day-some days, 14 or
15 hours-installing instruments and replacing vacuum lines. "It's the first time I've heard
a radial engine," he says. "My generation hears

AOPA Pilot Magazine - August 2019

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