Hugh Sidey's America Sky King Flies Again

By Hugh Sidey

Look for the soaring soul of America this week of high summer among the corn fields and pastures around Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The gentle prairie breezes are being ruffled by the snarls of thousands of tiny airplanes, birthed in basements and garages, built from plans or kits, antiques rescued from rust and decay by men and women who, like Orville and Wilbur Wright, still want to fly free like birds. Now and then at this mecca of private aviation, the towering cumulus clouds are sundered by warbirds like the gull-winged Corsair, the kind the Jolly Rogers squadron flew in the Pacific, lovingly restored by men with heroic memories and oversize checkbooks (half a million dollars and up).

Before this week is out, more than 12,000 airplanes and 1 million onlooking enthusiasts will flock to the Experimental Aircraft Association convention, centered in Oshkosh but splayed out over the lush Wisconsin landscape from Fond du Lac to Appleton and Green Bay. This remarkable event was begun in a basement 42 years ago by flyer Paul Poberezny, the son of a Ukrainian immigrant. Involving 400 types of aircraft, it is judged by some to be the world's biggest convention and aviation's most diversified air show, dwarfing state fairs and even Woodstock '94, drawing people from all 50 states and 80 countries, many of whom are looking for customers for the airplanes they build.

However, this joyous encampment is, in its way, a protest against government regulation. With its exuberance, it defies the devastation wrought by liability lawyers on aviation. The troubles are grave. In 1978 manufacturers produced 17,800 small airplanes. Today they turn out fewer than 1,000, a 95% drop in business, much of it due to the fears of lawsuits. Under existing laws, manufacturers can be sued any time a plane breaks down or is involved in an accident -- even if the sturdy little flyer has flown reliably for a quarter-century. Piper Aircraft Corp. of Vero Beach, Florida, made the famous Cub -- the little yellow plane that thrilled county-fair audiences with rides and stunts like the Flying Farmer, a "runaway" plane with Grandma on board and cornstalks streaming from its landing gear. Now the company is in bankruptcy. The $25 million annual budget that Cessna used to spend to promote flying has been used up in lawyers' fees.

The number of airports for small planes fell from 10,000 to 4,000 in a decade. The process of getting a pilot's license became so intimidating that the number of beginners, which used to run 140,000 a year, fell to less than half that. The romance of flying seemed to be dying. "If a kid wanted to fly for fun he'd be better off to go get himself a horse or a Harley," Poberezny once muttered in frustration. But flight has been in the American bloodstream for nearly a century, and is not about to be extinguished. The surviving flyers are master innovators, skirting the dense regulations and distancing themselves from the lawyers. A 1949 federal rule makes it legal to fly an airplane even if it has not been certified by the FAA so long as the plane is not used for commercial purposes and 51% of it is built by the owner. As a result, manufacturers now market 200 kinds of do-it-yourself kits. Some 16,000 home-built planes are flying, ranging from the spidery ultralights to midget P-51 Mustangs. They come with exotic names such as Kitfox and Glasair. An ultralight costs only a few thousand dollars, and even a sleek Cozy Mark IV, a four-passenger plane, can be built for about $20,000 -- and 2,500 hours devoted to tooling the plane together. The Glasair people claim that building their kit plane is the equivalent, in hours, of getting a college engineering degree.

For all the time and expense, the ranks of those who cannot resist the allure of flight are growing. E.A.A. now has 140,000 members in 750 chapters around the globe. The club is expanding 5% each year. Meanwhile, there is a bill near passage in Congress that would put an 18-year limit on liability for manufactured aircraft. Pass the bill, Cessna promises, and it will gear up production of small planes. "Remember, most of the people in the world have not flown -- many yearn to," says Tom Poberezny, Paul's son and the current president of E.A.A. The romance of the sky may only have been obscured.

The men and women on the Oshkosh flight line know that. Bart and Karen Miller of Madison, Wisconsin, brought their children Jacob, 4, and Sarah, 2, in a Cessna 182, one of those models headed for extinction. They pitched their camp beneath a wing, and as the kids played with a model plane, they watched the air show. Architect Frank Pavliga, 37, tenderly wiped the drops from a summer squall off the wing of his Pietenpol Air Camper, a 1929 design built from plans given to him and his father by Bernard Pietenpol himself. Pavliga had flown the tiny plane from his home in Rootstown, Ohio, and a couple of friends joined him in a Cub and another Pietenpol. Says Pavliga: "If there is anything I own in my life that I will never sell, it is this airplane."

Private aviation, in the end, is the personalization of an American frontier, with its own pioneers and explorers. Nat Puffer, 68, flew in from Mesa, Arizona, crossing the Rockies with his wife in their Cozy. As a kid, he had met Amelia Earhart. "If you're going to go faster than 55 m.p.h.," she told him, "it's safer to be in a plane." He never forgot.