AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - September 2011 - 38

PILOTBRIEFING
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BY ALTON K. MARSH

‘Plane Jane’ makes last flight

our low-and-slow taildraggers lined up to depart Maryland’s Frederick Municipal Airport. Led by a 1929 Fleet Model 2 biplane, the procession was an unusual sight for Washington, D.C.’s, highly restricted airspace as the group made its way to Washington Dulles International Airport to mix with jetliners on the tarmac. The aircraft were on a very important mission: to deliver the Fleet to its new home at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on Become a Pilot Day June 18. It was the Fleet’s last flight. The Fleet Model 2, Serial No. 75, left the factory in 1929 and spent more than a decade at Roosevelt Aviation School on Long Island’s Roosevelt Field. The only surviving Roosevelt Field trainer, it spent decades in pieces before A&P mechanic and FAA maintenance inspector Gene Breiner hauled the fuselage from its hangar, collected boxes of parts from garages around eastern Pennsylvania, and picked up the wings from a barn in 1978. Breiner spent years meticulously restoring it to its condition as a pre-World-War-II trainer and then flew it from 1985 to this year, when he and his daughter, Joyce, donated it to the Smithsonian. As Breiner worked to restore the airplane, he learned more about its history at Roosevelt Field during the prewar civilian pilot training boom. Alumni from the airport supplied him with mementos and photographs that helped with the restoration. And once it was airworthy he made some history of his own, flying to airshows and fly-ins around the East Coast and giving rides to friends and family. “This wasn’t flown by just famous pilots,” Breiner said. “This was flown by a lot of people. It’s a people’s airplane.” 38 • SEPTEMBER 2011

The trainer is a scaled-down version of Consolidated Aircraft’s PT–3 military aircraft. Breiner said he named it Plane Jane at the suggestion of a friend in his EAA chapter because “there’s nothing special about it. It’s just a plain airplane.” It may be a basic trainer for its day, but the Fleet is well rigged, rugged, and responsive, Breiner said: “You can do all the maneuvers with two fingers.” Breiner, 86, started building model airplanes at the age of 7—as soon as he was old enough to use razor blades to cut balsa wood. The restored Fleet connected him to an exciting time in aviation, but it was becoming harder to maintain and fly the aging aircraft. “There’s fewer of us around that understand the old airplanes,” he said, and many younger pilots “don’t understand the TLC it takes to keep them

going.” So Breiner and Joyce decided it was time to deliver it to the Smithsonian, where its legacy would live on. The legacy lives on in another way, too: in the logbooks of those who flew it over its two lifetimes. The son of John Machamer, the ferry pilot for the last flight, soloed the airplane the morning of its delivery to the Smithsonian. That morning, Breiner climbed into the cockpit at Frederick wearing a white scarf and a flying helmet. Machamer swung the wooden prop to bring the Kinner radial engine to life, and then climbed into the cockpit himself. The biplane taxied out to the runway. It descended a slope just out of view for a moment before its top wing reappeared. The airplane lifted off, rocked its wings gently, and proceeded on course until it disappeared from sight. —Sarah Brown

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AOPA Turbine Pilot Magazine - September 2011

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