Antique Tube Radios

'Plane Jane' makes last flight

Four low-and-slow taildraggers lined up to depart Runway 23 at Maryland’s Frederick Municipal Airport. Led by a 1929 Fleet Model 2 biplane, the procession was an unusual sight for Washington, D.C.’s highly restricted airspace as it made its way to Washington Dulles International Airport to mix with jetliners on the tarmac.

The aircraft—the Fleet, a 1930 Waco RNF, a Citabria, and a Cessna 120—were more at home at eastern Pennsylvania grass strips, but they were on a very important mission: to deliver the Fleet to its new home at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on Become a Pilot Day June 18. It was the Fleet’s last flight.

With restorer Gene Breiner in the front cockpit and pilot John Machamer in the rear, the airplane taxied onto the runway, accelerated with a putter of the five-cylinder Kinner radial engine, and lifted off to take its place in American aviation history.

The Fleet Model 2, Serial No. 75, left the factory in 1929 and spent more than a decade at Roosevelt Aviation School on Long Island’s Roosevelt Field. The aircraft—the only surviving Roosevelt Field trainer, according to the Smithsonian—spent decades in pieces before A&P mechanic and FAA maintenance inspector Breiner hauled the fuselage from its hangar, collected boxes of parts from garages around eastern Pennsylvania, and picked up the wings from a barn in 1978. He spent years meticulously restoring it to its historical condition as a pre-World-War-II trainer and then flew it from 1985 to June 18 this year, along the way making history of a more personal sort. He and daughter Joyce Breiner donated it to the Smithsonian at the museum’s Become a Pilot Day.

Double-winger

Breiner came across the Fleet’s fuselage frame in a hangar at Blue Swan Airport in Sayre, Pa., shortly after leaving the Air Force in 1952, he said. He had just started a maintenance shop at Danville, Pa., and was looking for an aircraft to re-cover as a winter project—and he had always wanted a biplane.

“We joked, ‘You haven’t flown until you’ve flown a double-winger,’” he said.

He asked about buying the airplane, but the owner said he had plans to rebuild it. Breiner moved to Richmond, Va., in 1963 to work for the FAA but later returned to eastern Pennsylvania. During some routine work at Blue Swan, he again came across the Fleet.

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