Think How Much Went Into Building -- Or Rebuilding -- It

By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

How many hours go IN to an airplane? Homebuilders will tell you it's not the 300 or 600 often claimed by kit airplane manufacturers. Even the most reputable designers and vendors make these laughable claims; Aircraft Spruce ads used to tell you to budget 600 hours for your Rutan Vari-Eze. Will everyone who built an -Eze in 600 hours raise his right hand? Uh-huh, I figured as much.

The "mode" or most common answer I've gotten over the years, when asking that "hours" question, is some variation of, "Oh, goodness gracious. I don't dare to add it up!" The next most common answers are nice round numbers like "2,000" and "4,000." The precise, exacting cynic will tell you it cost him, "3,253 hours, $39,617.41, and Mabel and the kids -- so far."

That kind of builder takes the same perverse pride in adversity that a marathoner does in overcoming cramps on Heartbreak Hill. Pleasure is where you find it.

Of course, not everybody builds like homebuilders. During the frenzy of war production in 1940-45, a pile of raw materials and subassemblies might have been rolling on to the test flight ramp as a completed airplane less than a hundred hours from the time the production manager put its build number on the schedule. The multiplicative power of many hands and industrial machinery shouldn't be underestimated.

And then there are more than the manufacturer's hours in an old airplane -- there are the hours spent keeping it up. Or, God help you, the hours spent bringing it back. I've seen planes fly that short years before were rusting on a Eurasian lakebed, and we all know the story of Glacier Girl, Don Shoffner's P-38E which recently was featured at Airventure. Decades of abandonment, years of restoration, moments of delight.

Tell me again why we do this?

Karl Marx used to believe that the only value in something was the sum of the human labor that produced it -- he called this the "Labor Theory of Value," and it's as dead as phrenology or Lysenkoism everywhere except universities, which preserve it for some inexplicable reason.

To disprove the Labor Theory of Value you only need to look at the planes for sale by warbird sales guru Mark Clark's Courtesy Aircraft.

Some incredibly beautifully restored planes are selling for relatively short money -- a TBM Avenger, the plane President George H.W. Bush flew as a young Navy lieutenant, has an asking price lower than a new Mooney -- even though the Avenger has had an extremely thorough restoration.

The ultimate restoration was probably Glacier Girl, which essentially has been built twice: once by Lockheed, and once by Shoffner's restoration crew, which de-riveted the whole thing, replacing over 99% of the factory rivets. The team included a small army of mechanics -- peaking at three full-timers and a manager on the books at one time. I don't know how many hours were involved. Literally millions of dollars worth, plus inordinate amounts of volunteer labor.

Shoffner will never recover the $3+ million he has spent on his airplane, but the reward that Glacier Girl brings him doesn't figure in Marx's academic calculus. But when you see Glacier Girl fly, with Steve Hinton at the controls, you ought to think for a moment of the workers that did everything from buck those thousands of rivets, to make endless calls and visits in search of rare parts and tools. And to Don Shoffner, who first earned, and then spent, the money to make the plane new.

Volunteer labor is the muscle that moves historic aviation's wings. Evergreen Aviation Museum, in McMinnville, Oregon, keeps track of its volunteers' hours: 221 volunteers currently contribute to the Museum, and 195,965 hours of volunteer effort have been booked since the museum and Michael King Smith Educational Institute opened its doors in 2001, 58,215 hours in 2004 alone. Not all of those hours are spent doing restoration work, but the Museum has a figure for the hours that are: 48.992 since opening.

You plane might not be historic, but think of the hours that have gone into building and maintaining her. How many maintenance hours? Well, as a rule of thumb, average the labour hours of your last few annuals and multiply times the airplane age in years. Also, if the plane's had hundred-hour inspections (if it was used commercially) then add those too. For example, the high time crown in my fleet is held by a plane built in 1978. In those 26 years, it's amassed 17,000 airframe hours, about 654 hours a year; and it's always been in revenue service, so it will have received 170 100-hour inspections in that time. That's a lot of maintenance hours.

Airliners don't do 100-hour and annual inspections the way we do in general aviation -- they undergo stage checks. You know how many hours are in a D check? Me either. I bet it's more, at least more man-hours, than the sum of all those 100-hours.

Next time you settle into a pilot seat, whether you're lucky like our friend who's going to be flying the right seat in a perfectly restored B-25 this week, or just starting out like our traffic pilots who are strapping on elderly, weary 152s, give a thought to not just how many hours are on the plane, but how many hours are in the plane.

You might start her with a little bit more respect this time.

FMI: www.eaa.org