steven tyler - Antilles Seaplanes

WWW.PRIVATEAIRDAILY.COM
THE FAST TIMES OF
STEVEN
TYLER
DUCK,DUCK'
AvlntageG rummanG
'
number N21A sit
oose, serial
In IIBurlln gton, ,North
s atCan armY hangar
m es from whe
arollna, lust
will roll out.
re the new models
I
/1
~.­
-,­
_.p-.. j
',.".
.,­- -~
It was one of the most famous planes ever made, the archetypal mid-century flying boat that ferried
Hemingway, Harriman and MacArthur. Now, 63 years after the last one wheeled off the assembly line,
a North Carolina accountant defies all odds to hatch a whole new flock. By Scott Eden Photographs by Ian Spanier
I
"
he resurrection began
one balmy fall after­
noon in 2000 inside
an otherwise anony­
mous warehouse in the
industrial district of North
Miami. On a loading ramp
just within the building's front
door sat a Pratt & Whitney
Wasp Junior air-cooled 1940s­
era radial engine. Lining the walls
and scattered about the floor were
30-foot shelves, piled to the point
of danger - a fire trap, a head injury awaiting only gravity and
one false move - with wings, propellers, windshields, bulkheads,
struts, spars, ribs, rudders, flaps, floats and miscellaneous widgetry
of an uncountable number of decommissioned planes. Dust motes
floated in the brown sunbeams of a skylight, and the tart odor of
machine oil filled the air. If it seemed like the workshop of a manic
tinkerer, an aviation packrat, it was. But amid the clutter, moored
atop a set of wooden sawhorses in the middle of the warehouse
floor, nestled the denuded fuselage of a Grumman G-21 twin­
engine amphibious airplane - the iconic airborne yacht known
as "the Goose," island hopper of many a fervid dream, including
that of a 50-year-old certified public accountant from Burlington,
North Carolina.
His name was V.L. Manuel, and he had come to Miami to meet
the man who had placed the classified ad. He had brought with him
his good friend and client Tim, who owned a propeller-refurbishing
company, and together, they were in the market for a seaplane
and a retirement plan. "I was at that point in life where you think
about slowing down and readjusting," Manuel says. Five years ear­
lier, he had suffered a heart attack; both men had worked hard for
more than 30 years. Both had businesses they could sell and had
amassed sufficient savings to live out their days in relative ease.
Both liked vacationing in the Caribbean. What better way to spend
their golden years than in the tropics with their families, tooling
around as they pleased in a tricked-out flying boat from aviation's
golden age? Actually, they'd decided there was one better way:
to tool around in a Grumman Goose they would refurbish them­
selves. They wanted a plane
with which they could get their
hands a little dirty, then take to
the sky with the kind of pride
that comes only from good,
hard labor. They wanted, in the
end, a restoration project, and
they got it in ways that went
far beyond anything they could
have imagined.
The man who had placed
the ad was Dean Franklin, a
legendary character in avia­
tion history. When Manuel sat
down to commence nego­
tiations for the Goose in
Franklin's office, its walls
papered with yellowed photos
of planes and pilots, he heard a
storybook's worth of tall tales.
Franklin told Manuel about the
time he sold a plane to Howard
Hughes. The billionaire flew off
without paying, but at a trade
show some months later, the
two met again.
"Dean, did I ever pay you
for that airplane?"
"No, you didn't."
Without another word,
Hughes withdrew his bill­
fold, counting out the cash
into Franklin's open palm.
In 1935, Franklin hooked up
with another legend, Arthur
"Pappy" Chalk, becoming
chief pilot of Chalk's Flying
Service, the small, mostly
Goose-based carrier con­
necting South Florida, the
Bahamas and various points
in the Caribbean. Franklin
occasionally ferried Ernest
Hemingway to Bimini and
back, and during Havana's
gambling heyday, he and
Chalk made good money
flying gangsters there - and
law-enforcement officials
in pursuit of the gangsters.
Franklin bought the company
from a retiring Pappy in 1966
and sold it seven years later,
after which he founded his
own airplane-restoration and
parts-resale business. At some
point, he acquired the entire
manufacturer's stockpile
of Goose parts (including a
handful of intact planes) from
Grumman itself, which had
discontinued the Goose years
before. From Grumman head­
quarters in Bethpage, New
York, the inventory - includ­
ing the original FAA type
certificates, engineer's draw­
ings and blueprints - went
into Franklin's warehouse in
Miami, and for years he was
the world's only dealer of spare
Goose parts, supplying equip­
ment to vintage-plane hobby­
ists and the many island hop­
pers who operated the sturdy
seaplane in fleets around the
world. Among Franklin's cus­
tomers was his friend Jimmy
Buffett, who in 1994 crashed
his Goose off the coast of
\,
\
\
Nantucket, then dedicated his
novel Where is Joe Merchant?
to Franklin and his wife.
Manuel and his partner
listened raptly to these sto­
ries. Before long, Franklin, 92,
divulged that he was thinking of
slowing down. "You boys seem
to like this stuff," he said. "I tell
you what: I'll sell you the entire
package." For three days in
Miami, Manuel and his partner
considered the idea. Finally
they agreed, figuring they could
make enough money reselling
what they didn't need that it
would pay for the restoration of
their own Goose. They'd get a
few logistical headaches out of
the deal, to be sure, but they'd
also get a free plane. With the
help of a bank loan, they paid
Franklin close to a million dol­
lars. Thirteen tractor-trailers
soon rolled out of Miami
and hauled the stockpile to a
former textiles warehouse in
Gibsonville, North Carolina,
near Manuel's home. Manuel
and his friend began to inven­
tory what was there, counting
for weeks. When they reached
150,000 items, they gave up.
Word spread fast around
the seaplane community
that Dean Franklin's Goose
stockpile now inhabited North
Carolina. Late one evening,
Manuel received a call from
Pacific Coastal Airlines of
Vancouver, which had four
Gooses (the plural "Geese" is
never used) in its fleet. The air­
line used them to haul salmon
fishermen to lodges on Victoria
Island and loggers to sites deep
in British Columbia's forests.
Pacific Coastal wanted to buy a
certain kind of cable for a mal­
functioning plane in its fleet.
Manuel rummaged through the
warehouse but could find only
the connectors for the cable.
But Manuel's partner, with
i /
NATION BUILDING:
Purchasing manag~r J~ff Crowder
holds a Vintage elevator assembly
under the fl/lgs of Interested new­
Goose customers; (opposite page) the
main factory floor In Glbsor:1Ville. N.C.
his aviation-parts background, knew just what to do. He bought a
cable at the local hardware store, and, after reconstructing the piece
to FAA specs, sold it to Pacific Coastal for such a tidy sum that he
and Manuel began to wonder about the size of the market for spare
Goose parts. That, in turn, sparked a much larger question: How big
might the market be for the Goose flying boat itself, fully capable
and fully loaded?
Manuel, a former CPA, commissioned a business plan to deter­
mine the answer. When the numbers came back, he says, they
seemed so promising "I didn't believe it. So I did my own market
study." He determined that the potential pool of buyers exceeded
200. In his calculus he included rich vintage-plane enthusiasts,
isolated island resorts reachable only by boat or plane and small
seaside and outback operators,
many of which, like Chalk's
and Pacific Coastal, already
owned Gooses. He had all the
original Grumman drawings
and blueprints. His brother
Jeff, an assembly-line special­
ist at a big auto~parts plant in
nearby Greensboro, owned a
machine-tool shop as a side
business. Working the num­
bers, Manuel determined he
could build a modern Goose
PRIVATE AIR 85
from scratch, fabricating new
parts using the old Grumman
plans, installing contemporary
avionics and control systems
and thereby resurrecting a
modern version of a brand and
type that last rolled off a fac­
tory floor in 1945. Based on his
math, he estimated that such a
venture would begin earning a
profit after only 16 planes were
sold. The entrepreneur in him
couldn't resist. There would be
no slow hobbyist's restoration
project, nor any adventure­
some Buffett-esque island­
hopping tours of the Caribbean
- at least not anytime soon.
"I had a new retirement plan,"
Manuel says today. "Go back
into business and work like
a dog."
mong
Manuel's first
orders ofbusi­
ness was to
give his avia­
tion startup a name. He and
his partner wanted something
that reflected the uncommon
provenance of the Goose,
A
86 PRIVATEAIRDAILY.COM
its romance and allure - a name that explained why they, like so
many before them, had become obsessed with this machine. The
legend of Grumman's flying boat rests on a set of contradictions:
It is at once glamorous and rugged, elegant and brawny. It carried
starlets and potentates; it flew in the service of coast guards and
oil companies. It's been tethered to the docks of Ottoman palaces
cantilevered over the Bosporus. It's been parked near the shacks
of beach bums sleeping one off on a Florida Key. As comfortable
in the marina at Saint-Tropez as on a lake near an Alaskan logging
camp, the Goose is Chanel as conceived by L.L. Bean. Rivers, lakes,
oceans, harbors, snow, grass, dirt, macadam: The Goose can go
hull, of course, with a three­
step bottom and a V shape.
From the front it looked like
a big Chris-Craft. Its Pratt
& Whitney power plant, two
eight-cylinder, 450-horsepower
radials, yielded a cruising
speed of 180 miles per hour.
Its original retractable land­
ing gear was the same one
Grumman had developed for
The Goose went skimming across the
surface,
all systems seemin ly
.
.
normal,
seemingly anywhere, and it's this intrinsic versatility, this poten­
tial for uninhibited voyaging, that has imbued the plane with its
most seductive allure - that of living life on one's own terms.
From its inception, the Goose offered glamour in spades. In
1936, a group of Wall Street tycoons approached Leroy Grumman,
who had started his business just seven years earlier, about build­
ing a plane that could zip them from their homes on Long Island to
their offices in Lower Manhattan. They were looking for comfort
and style, yes, but they also required something hardy, for their
plane would need to handle landings in New York Harbor. The
resulting machine was an all-metal monoplane with a cruciform
tail section and twin engines set on the leading edge of wings
mounted high atop the fuselage. The fuselage itself was also a
its F4F Wildcat carrier-based
fighter plane. Its cabin could
be outfitted with a lavatory
and a galley.
Among the first to take
delivery of the plane in 1937
were department-store mag­
nate Marshall Field, finan­
cier E. Roland Harriman,
Morgan Stanley cofounder
Henry Morgan and news­
paper publisher Colonel
Robert McCormick. Lord
Beaverbrook, the London
newspaper baron, and Boris
Sergievsky, chief test pilot
for Sikorsky, were among the
other early buyers.
The Goose cemented the
second part of its reputation
- its durability and brawn ­
when Grumman signed a con­
tract with the U.S. government
and began building Gooses for
the war effort. The Goose was
used by the navies, coast guards
and air corps of 11 nations,
pulling duty on transport
jumps, rescue missions and
submarine hunts. It purport­
edly flew Douglas MacArthur
around the newly reoccupied
Philippines. The Goose also
grew in popularity with air car­
riers and industrial companies.
KLM flew two Gooses in the
Dutch East Indies in the early
1940s, one of which was shot
down by the Japanese. Texaco
used the plane to supply off­
shore oil rigs, and its advertise­
ments in the'40s featured a
red Grumman Goose with the
words THE TEXAS Co. stenciled
on the tail fin.
For all the Goose's success,
the oncomingjet age put an
end to Grumman's interest
in the flying boat, and after
its military contract ended,
it ceased production of the
Goose. All told, the company
made just 345 ofthem.
But the operational his­
tory of the plane was far from
over. War-surplus Gooses
went into service with small
airlines all over the world,
wherever a lack of airstrips
made them necessary: Fiji,
Papua New Guinea, Croatia,
Norway, Iceland, Colombia,
Peru. For years, two compet­
ing companies used Gooses to
haui tourists from Long Beach
to Catalina Island. But the
plane probably found its true
niche in the Alaskan wilder­
ness - where dozens of small
operators and individual bush pilots flew the plane - and as an
island hopper in the Caribbean. (Indeed, the Goose made for a
superior drug-running ship; several have been seized in narcotics
raids over the years by various governments.) Aside from Chalk,
the most famous Caribbean seaplane operator was Antilles Air
Boats. Based out of St. Croix, it was owned by movie star Maureen
O'Hara and her third husband, former Air Force Brigadier General
Charles Blair, the first pilot to fly solo in a jet over the North Pole.
O'Hara retired from Hollywood to start the company with Blair.
"It was worth quitting the movies to go with him adventuring
around the world," she once said. At one point the couple owned so
many Gooses - 19, the largest fleet in the world - that their com­
pany became known as simply "The Goose." One morning in 1978,
on a Goose flight from St. Croix to St. Thomas, Blair's left engine
failed. He couldn't maintain level flight, and when the plane hit
the water, it "cartwheeled around the left wing and broke apart,"
according to the accident report. Blair died instantly, along with
three of the 10 passengers. Despite the tragedy, O'Hara continued
to run the company for some time - becoming the world's first
female head of an airliner - before selling it in the '80s. (It has
since gone out of business.)
After reviewing all this history, Manuel decided he had his name:
Antilles Air Boats. It had the ring he sought; it captured the spirit of
the plane - the adventure, the toughness, the glamour and, yes, the
danger. He tried to contact O'Hara to secure her permission to use
the name, but wasn't able to. So he altered it slightly, and in 2001,
Antilles Seaplanes LLC, of Gibsonville, North Caro!ina - 200 miles
from the nearest ocean - was christened.
ix and a half years later, Antilles had yet to produce a
single plane. Then, in August 2007, it received its first
substantial outside investment: several million dol­
lars (Manuel refuses to divulge a specific figure) from
a group of businessmen out of eastern North Carolina,
with the promise of further millions should the company hit a series
of benchmarks, including the rollout of the first Antilles Super
Goose, as it's been dubbed, by the first quarter of 2009.
These six and half years had been a struggle for Manuel. He lost
his partner, Tim, who decided the startup was too much for him
(and has requested his full name not be printed, the litigious avia­
tion industry being what it is). Manuel poured his life savings
into the venture. He leveraged his assets with bank debt and bor­
rowed money from friends. "I put up everything I had," he says. "I
was funding it off the hip." He estimates that, all told, he pumped
around $7 million into Antilles Seaplanes - a far cry from the "free
plane" he originally thought he was getting. But he made progress.
He erected a 20,000-square-foot assembly plant on a field in rural
Gibsonville. He hired three mechanics who not only began repair­
ing the Goose that carne with the Franklin stash, but mapping its
structure as they went along, documenting every nut, bolt, screw
and control surface, then comparing what they found to the original
Grumman drawings.
Manuel and his colleagues figured they'd need other Gooses
as well to use as demos for prospective customers. From an air-
S
PRIVATE AIR 87
craft salvage yard in Spokane,
Washington, they found
the hulk of No. 1054 (the
fifty-fourth Goose made by
Grumman). They researched
its history and learned that the
plane had once been confiscat­
ed by the government of Belize
in a drug raid, and had earlier
been owned by Texaco - the
Goose of the oil company's
long-ago advertising campaign,
in fact. Antilles brought it to
Gibsonville, and the mechan­
ics set about mapping that one,
too, shucking it all the way to
the keel strip in order to re­
engineer it from the inside out.
One of the most crucial
developments came when
Manuel met Dan Vollum, the
66 PRIVATEAIRDAILY.COM
owner of a charter company based in Portland, Oregon. Vollum,
an aficionado who has owned five Gooses over the years, had
earlier acquired the remains of another Portland company called
McKinnon Enterprises, which had been in the business of modify­
ing Gooses - it removed the original piston-fired radial engines
and replaced them with new Pratt & Whitney turboprops, increas­
ing their payload, speed and range. Ensuring the airworthiness of
these conversions required so much reengineering that the FAA
judged the resulting machine to be an entirely new aircraft type.
The planes were hence called McKinnon Gooses, and the company
applied for (and received) FAA type certificates, which also gave
anyone who owned the documents the ability to manufacture new
turboprop Gooses from scratch. When Manuel learned about this,
he bought the McKinnon remains from Vollum almost on the spot.
With the purchase of the McKinnon lot, Antilles now essentially
had FAA approval for all its Goose designs - a major score, given
that cost of FAA type certificates for new planes cost from $20 mil­
lion to $320 million. (He has reserved the possibility of building
special-order Gooses for those customers, such as Jimmy Buffett,
who have insisted on a radial.)
Inside Antilles' Gibsonville plant today, the bygone and the
modern coexist easily. On
racks along the back wall sit
hundreds of wooden tools that
Grumman's workers in Long
Island once used to hand­
shape the metal spars and ribs
and other pieces that went into
the plane. In the engineer­
ing office upstairs, stored in
CAD software, are drawings
of the same parts - data that
will eventually be fed into
the super-high-tech mill that
occupies a prominent spot on
the factory floor within sight
of Franklin and Texaco's origi­
nal denuded Gooses.
Though Antilles is already
fabricating its own parts, it
has yet to complete the full
reengineering process, hav­
ing finished the fuselage,
wings and tail. Still to come
are the trailing edges and the
elevators. ''We're getting more
confident with each step," says
Jeff Manuel, who's overseeing
the process and design of the
assembly line. Everything will
be in place sometime this year,
at which point all that will
remain is final FAA manufac­
turing approval. (The company
has approached the regulatory
body to set up an initial meet­
ing. Thus far, no date has been
set.) Manuel expects Antilles
to be able to turn out a plane a
month. ''I'll be ready for them
to walk in and say, 'OK, Jeff,
we've got 200 orders. Turn
it on.''''
On my visit to Gibsonville
in early January 2008, every­
one at the plant was buzzing
with excitement. Beneath
rafters hung with the flags of
20 countries (every time a new
delegation arrives for a tour,
Antilles hangs its national
flag), Manuel walked the floor,
warning, "Be careful. Be very
careful. This is contagious and
addictive."
David Lockman, a retired aeronautics engineer who has signed
on as a consultant, was there, too, and he motioned to the Texaco
Goose: "Awful lot of aviation history sitting in that room. That's
the most famous Goose in the world."
Manuel wasn't so sure. "In my world, the most famous Goose
is the first one out this door - and that has a price tag on it."
(Manuel, who had resisted taking deposits until he got the FAA
type certificates, has set the base sticker price at $2.86 million.)
Meanwhile, another of Antilles' key staffers, chief pilot David
Hamrick, was at the Burlington airport, tending to the company's
latest acquisition: a fully operable Goose, serial No. N2lA, which
the company had bought just after Christmas from a private owner
in Illinois. Hamrick had come out of retirement five years earlier
to join Antilles; in preparation for his new job, he'd gotten his sea­
plane types from an instructor in Florida and spent nearly a month
in British Columbia flying with the boys at Pacific Coastal Airlines.
A certified flight instructor himself, Hamrick was spending nearly
all his working hours at the hangar near the Goose, inside the Goose
and, when the January weather permitted, up in the Goose, enhanc­
ing his seaplane proficiency - a key word in Hamrick's vocabulary.
He was known for his caution and discipline, which was partly why
he was hired in the first place. Among his responsibilities, after all,
would be training Antilles customers to pilot the flying boat. He
would also have a hand in the design of the modernized cockpit, as
well as in the writing of the owner's manual that would come with
each plane. Born and raised in Georgia, he speaks with a Chuck
Yeager drawl. "You kind of get rejuvenated," he said of his new
gig. "You feel good about things again."
Not long after bringing serial No. N2lA to North Carolina,
Hamrick had taken the Goose up for a spin. He radioed down to
Gibsonville and told them to keep an eye on the sky. When he did
his fly-by, he toggled the yoke
and the Goose's wings waved.
Recalling the moment, V.L.
Manuel said, "I didn't think 1
was very emotional, but 1 had
to swallow real hard. Because
you know what? That's seven
years of my life."
Three weeks later, Hamrick
and an Antilles mechanic
named Don May took N2lA
on a trip to the Florida Keys.
Hamrick planned to prac­
tice some water landings
- enhancing his proficiency
- and get some beauty shots
of the plane that would appear,
among other places, in this
magazine. A photographer
and 1 were to meet them in
Marathon Key, and they prom­
ised to take us for a ride.
On the morning of January
29, the day before our arrival,
Hamrick began his approach
into a spot of baby-blue
Gulf of Mexico five miles off
Marathon. The Goose went
skimming across the surface,
all systems seemingly normal,
just your average water land­
ing. The next thing Hamrick
knew, he was hanging from
the tail, his arm slashed and
bleeding. Don May was nearby,
his leg in pain. The plane was
upside down. A fisherman sped
over in his boat and plucked
the men out. He had witnessed
the whole thing: the Goose
on approach, splashing down,
skimming across the surface,
stopping almost as if it had run
aground and somersaulting
like a toy. The men were air­
lifted to Miami. May had bro­
ken his leg. Hamrick had sev­
ered an artery in his arm, and
required emergency vascular
surgery. Both are expected to
recover fully. As for the Goose,
no one knows. A barge pulled
the wreck out and hauled it to
Homestead, Florida. The FAA
is investigating.
Almost the entire Antilles
staff immediately flew to
Miami. Said Manuel at
Hamrick's bedside after his
surgery, "You're still the direc­
tor of flight ops for Antilles.
We think we've got the best in
the world."
Antilles plans to undertake
its own exhaustive examina­
tion of what happened, to learn
whether any design improve­
ment - a stronger or more
flexible hull, for instance ­
might have prevented the crash
and might be implemented into
the Antilles version. If any­
thing, then, Manuel's resolve
seems to have grown stronger.
"Our goal is to get our Goose to
where it's safer in every way,"
he says. "It's a great project,
the world needs it and 1 think
we've got a heck of a company.
It won't be long now before
there's a plane with Antilles'
name on it in the sky." •
WISH YOU WERE HERE:
Grumman made the Goose for only eight years, turning out 345 of them. but
as these vintage postcards show, Its reach far extended Its numbers.
PRIVATE AIR 89