'Tin Goose' passengers take flight at Valley airport

By JORDAN COHEN

news@vindy.com

VIENNA

To board the vintage 1929 Ford Tri-Motor airplane at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport this weekend is to take a step back into America’s classic aviation history.

“Nothing has really changed,” said pilot Bill Thacker, who flew the plane to Youngstown from Port Clinton, where it is permanently housed at the Liberty Aviation Museum. “It’s exactly like it was – the smell, the sound and the feel.”

The Experimental Aircraft Association based in Oshkosh, Wis., has sponsored the plane’s visit through Sunday and is selling 15-minute rides to the public at $75 for adults. The EAA has two chapters in the Mahoning Valley.

The Tri-Motor, often referred to as the “Tin Goose” because of its silver metallic fuselage, seats only 10 passengers, but the interior is a reminder of what luxury air travel was like in the early 20th century.

“Henry Ford originally set the requirements for the way he wanted the plane to look,” said Thacker, a full-time pilot for United Airlines. “In those days, people traveled by train, so Ford wanted them to have the same experience when they got on the plane.”

As Ford envisioned, the plane’s doors and walls are wood-paneled with individual lamps above each window. The leather passenger seats, one of the few changes for modernization, are superior to the uncomfortable wicker seats the plane originally contained.

The sound Thacker referred to comes from its three roaring Pratt & Whitney 450-horsepower engines, but the plane averages only 80 knots of airspeed – and less if there are strong headwinds. Because of the Tri-Motor’s limitations, passengers had to combine train and airplane commutes to travel across the United States usually in three days.

To fly on the Tri-Motor was expensive. Thacker said passengers in those economically depressed days paid between $1,200 and $1,500.

The passengers who flew for a quarter-hour Thursday gave the plane glowing reviews.

“It was noisier than I thought it would be, but I absolutely enjoyed it,” said Bob McCully of Canfield, one of the first passengers to take advantage of the public flights Thursday. “It’s a great piece of history.”

Wilbur Springer, 87, of Cortland, another one of those passengers, has a familiarity with the Ford Tri-Motor that few others could. “I first rode in one when I was 7 years old in 1934 out of a grass strip on Parkman Road [Warren] that is long gone,” he said. “It took me 80 years to have my second flight.”

The flight was a gift from his daughter, according to a son who accompanied him on the short flight. “This plane’s a lot nicer than that first one I flew in,” the elder Springer said.

Other passengers offered similar glowing reviews. “It’s worth every penny,” said Shirley Burns of Vienna, who flew alongside her husband, Richard. “I’d get back in line to go on another one.”

Jim Heinzelman of the EAA said 199 of the planes were built during the Tri-Motor’s short lifetime, which ended in the early 1930s during the Depression.

“Only six are flying today, and there are 16 of them that could be made flyable, but that’s it,” he said.