Warbird Information Exchange

I was thinking Iskra, L-29, and the provest perhaps...

Chunks

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Jack McDonnel

T-6/SNJ Hoarder

Buying a Jet warbird is cheap .... its the gas, insurance, maintenance etc that would scare the heck out of me.

A friend restored a Yale and flew it frequently. Then he got a hankering for a jet and traded the Yale for an Iskra. I bet he didn't fly the Iskra a dozen times in the 3-4-5 years he owned it. For whatever reason, the fuel cost (and this was 10 years ago) and the field length requirements hadn't raised a red flag when he was buying the thing, but they really put a hurt on him when he became a jet owner.

A friend of mine sold his Fouga for $40K a few years back. It was in excellent condition with good times remaining. I think he flew the Fouga more than the Duke that replaced it... The Fouga just wasn't much of a family plane.

Curretly in Trade-A-Plane, there is a L-29, appearently airworthy, for $30,000.
Cheaper than a new Honda.

http://www.trade-a-plane.com/detail/air ... 26081.html

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Remember the vets, the wonderful planes they flew and their sacrifices for a future many of them did not live to see.
Note political free signature.
I figure if you wanted my opinion on items unrelated to this forum, you'd ask for it.

Right now the cheapest jet warbird is the F-313.

The first civilian jet warbirds in the U.S. were out before there were "warbirds." In Nashville, Tennessee, Jesse Stallings rebuilt a T-33 from a pole to use for an instrument trainer for his airline, Capital Airways. As the story goes, the T-33 burned more fuel per hour down low than his DC-8's! That was in the late 1960's. An F-86 or two were restored, probably at Chino or Mojave. After the ice cream shop incident, there weren't any F-86's around for a while flying for fun.
Air Progress had an article about two Vampires being flown out at Mojave by two eccentric rich guys that would buy kerosene by trailer truck load and go dogfighting. This was around 1976. Later you could count the jet warbirds on your fingers. A couple of T-33's, one Temco TT-1 Pinto, an F-84F, and later an F9F Panther.
Also going back to about 1970, with the Vampires, there were also two or three Gloster Meteors as seen on episodes of "Wonderwoman" 6 Million Dollar Man" etc. The Meteors are actually a WW II design.