Restored to Glory
Photos and Story by Jim Winnerman, St. Louis, MissouriTerry Chastain isn't a fan of small modern planes and all their gad-gets. He’d rather take the controls of a vintage aircraft any day.
"You have to physically fly the old planes," says Terry. "They won't fly themselves." Terry was 8 years old when his dad began teaching him to fly. He couldn't see out the window or reach the rudder pedals, so he flew by instrument. He got his license at 16 and along the way became quite fond of older airplanes.
So when he came upon a crashed biplane in 1991, he bought the wreckage, loaded it onto a trailer and carted it home to his garage with the intention of restoring it.
"I could not stand the thought of this plane wasting away," says Terry, who lives in Pacific, Missouri, and restores old planes as a second career.
Terry put that plane back in the air. He says it only took him "11 years, 5,000 hours and 15 minutes" to do it.
He never lost interest in the project. The reason it took more than a decade to finish was because of an unusual restoration problem. The biplane turned out to be one of a kind, so there were no blueprints or plans to follow.
It took 11 years to rebuild the plane, which a stunt pilot had crash-landed in 1985.
Click to EnlargeClaude C. Flagg made the plane in 1933, the only Flagg F-13 in existence. When the Great Depression forced him out of business, Claude sold the plane for $198 to pay the rent on his hangar.
Bruce Raymond, a well-known stunt pilot, bought the plane in 1935 and flew it in air shows for 50 years until he flipped over while landing it in 1985. The wreckage sat in storage until Terry bought it.
"The plane was in pretty bad shape," Terry recalls. "The wings had been destroyed, the landing gear was torn off, the fuselage was bent and the engine was destroyed."
Relying on his knowledge of flying, he rebuilt the landing gear, engine mount, fuselage, instrument panel, oil and fuel tanks and the thousands of wooden interior components of the wings. When parts were missing, he handcrafted them, using the remaining pieces of the plane as templates. Then he bought two engines and used them to make one rebuilt engine.
Terry is just the third pilot to fly the open-cockpit, one-seat plane. He figured out soon after taking the controls for the first time exactly why.
Claude had designed the plane for aerobatics. Pilots call this type of aircraft a sesquiplane, meaning the top wing is longer than the bottom: 21 feet versus 14 feet. The Flagg F-13 is very light, so there is little wind resistance. It can reach a speed of 220 mph.
"Planes used for aerobatics are not stable," notes Terry, who normally flies the Flagg between 80 and 140 mph. "The plane is very twitchy at high speeds. The slightest movement of the controls immediately affects the flight. About an hour is all I can stand before it wears me out."
Terry's brother, a corporate pilot, became the fourth person to fly the plane. Afterward, "he never asked to fly it again," Terry notes.
Still, Terry enjoys flying the Flagg F-13 as its creator intended—soaring through the sky upside down, through loops and barrel rolls.
"When you fly in the open cockpit of a biplane, exposed to the wind, you are really going back in time," says Terry with a smile.
Still, that first solo flight in the F-13 is always in the back of his mind.
"I call that first flight my 'first fright,'" he says. "Now I only fly it when I need an adrenaline rush. It's like being on one of those giant roller coasters."
