Joe Scheil wrote:
To keep speculators out there down, most projects have to go underground. Because nobody wants to say that they are building a flyable D-9, engine and engine component prices stay reasonable. Once somebody announces they are putting one together, every mantlepiece piston goes on the block for outragous sums.
Good call. I never thought of that. I'm going to remember that when I start my project in the next decade or two.
Joe Scheil wrote:
To predict that everything will be institutionalized is also folly, as flying warbirds drive restoration, not static display aquisition. The biggest danger to warbirds is legislation, nothing else can stop them...Oh and fuel... and safety.....oh and.....
I agree with the second part 100 percent, "flying warbirds drive restoration".For the first part, some things are kinda occuring to my beer stained mind, In the next few years, there will actually be 100 year old production aircraft flying around. I like that. I'm not sure how many hours an aircraft can fly before it's just plain tired, but I'm guessing that a lot of them are going to reach that hour in the next fifty years. I'm not sure what would be done at that point, but a complete restoration would probably leave very little of the original airplane left. I read that the FAA or the Navy did some testing on T28's to find the upper limit on airframe time, they figured it exceeded 35,000 hours. Thats cool. Most of the high time T28's I see rarely exceed 17,000 hours, thats after 50 years of flying. At some point, someones going to make the call, take a pristine, good example of an aircraft, and do a complete restore/replacement of just about everything it consists of, because it has reached a fantastically high time, so it can keep flying, or institutionalize it and build a new plane. I hope they keep the original flying, but I think as time goes on, that won't be the case, because of value,insurance,ect.
Thats where I'm coming from. Airplanes are still a pretty young thing. We're going to be finding out a lot of stuff in the next few years about the warbirds we love. Not the least of which is public perception of a 120 year old airplane flying over their house. I hope I'm wrong.