Warbird Information Exchange

A U.S. Army trainer plane from World War II, close to going airborne for the first time in 70 years, will make that “maiden voyage” from Modesto Airport.
The Vultee BT-13 Valiant was in pieces, spread between three hangars at the airport, when Jason Reid purchased it from the Commemorative Air Force there.
When he’s done, it will be among an elite group of fewer than 50 airworthy BT-13s in existence.
“A lot of military bases still have something like this out there, but all they are is a shell and … they will probably never fly again,” Reid said.Related After the war, the BT-13s were sold off in surplus for about $250, he said.
“All the crop dusters bought them, and they just wanted the engine and the prop off them,” Reid said. “They left them as carcasses out at the end of the airport in the fields to rot away.”
So it took a few years before he found one in a condition he could work with.
In a hangar on the airport’s general aviation side off Tioga Drive on Sunday, Reid stopped working on a box that will hold the plane’s radios and other communication devices to thumb through a 4-inch-thick binder chronicling its history.
It was flown by would-be pilots for two years in Waco, Texas. “Every pilot in WWII parked their butt in one of these for about 60 hours,” Reid said.
After the war, the plane was sold as surplus to a company in Oklahoma, then purchased by a Montana-based crop-dusting service.
A Wisconsin man bought it with the same intentions as Reid. His plans never took off, and he eventually sold the plane to CAF.
“They had it for a number of years,” Reid said. “No one really had the skill, the time or the money to put it back together, so I ended up buying it.”
The money, he said, has added up to about $80,000 – $65,000 in parts and $15,000 for the original purchase price.“The people who normally do these things, they pay people to do it,” he said. “Now they are a quarter-million dollars into an airplane that’s maybe only worth $140,000.”
His skill comes from years owning a Jaguar and Rolls-Royce repair shop and restoring about 50 of his own vintage cars.
This is his first airplane, but Reid said it’s also a machine, “just a different set of rules.”
His time is limited, so the restoration is reserved mostly for weekends. Reid lives and works in the Bay Area but drives to his hangar in Modesto every weekend.
When did he start?
“This long ago,” he said, holding up a 5-inch-long, blond ponytail. “I told myself it’s not getting cut off until she leaves the ground.”
A 5-inch ponytail equates to four years of work and serves as Reid’s incentive. He said he will donate his hair to Locks of Love after the first flight.
That will happen in a few months, Reid anticipates, after a bit more work and approval from a designated airworthiness representative from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Modesto residents will get the first opportunity to see the plane’s bright blue body, red nose and yellow underbelly as it flies over the city.
“It will catch your eye,” Reid said. “It’s very aggressive when she’s coming at you with the red spinner and the red nose. I enjoy taking something that was destined for crushers and putting it back into service for another 30 or 40 years.”