Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

[SkyvanDelta]

Wondering if anyone here, their parents, grandparents, friends..., purchased surplus Military airplanes or motors, radial or jet turbine, when the Military was selling them cheaply after the war was over?

Does anyone know of any facts, figures, stories, websites that describe this matter?

I know there are some stories from the Arfons family which used to buy the surplus jet engines, (which they were not supposed to be owning), and put them in their jet turbine powered drag cars and land speed cars.

And did Darrly Greenamyer own a F104 from Military suplus...? Was he suupposed to have NOT owned it, like it was never to have been made available to the public but was? Kind of like buying or finding the blueprints to a nuclear submarine in a garbage can or such.

[Leo]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

When I was about 11, my grandfather and a partner bought 3 PT boats at auction. He traded the allison engines to a guy (who was going to use them in offshore racing boats) for four marine diesels and equipment to convert them. He got two running, converted to cruisers and launched, the other was scrapped. One was sold on the east coast, the other was sailed thru Panama to San Fransisco. It too was sold soon after. For a few months work he got a great trip going thru Panama (he had his master certificate and was a Coast Guard power squadron commander and instructor) and made a few bucks. Enough to upgrade to a much nicer boat for himself.
Not aviation but...

[kiwiracefan]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Now please correct me if im wrong, but please no flaming comments, but if i read things right, Did Darryl Greenamyer not build his F104 out of parts at the time he was employed at Lockheed, and due to deal with ed browning and the red baron team it was designated RB-104?

[hm66sk]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

I heard he built it from discarded parts. A little piece at a time.

[AirDOGGe]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

There's a very good write-up about it here (3 pages worth):

LINK: http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.c...3756/index.htm


"...the Red Baron would be designated today as a USAF GE-powered Greenamyer-Lockheed F-104-A-B-C-D-G Starfighter Junkyard Special,..."

[dvddude]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Now please correct me if im wrong, but please no flaming comments, but if i read things right, Did Darryl Greenamyer not build his F104 out of parts at the time he was employed at Lockheed, and due to deal with ed browning and the red baron team it was designated RB-104?

I don't know how true it was, but the hot rumor in about '77 or '78 was that the static F-104 on base at Edwards was missing many parts which supposedly ended up somehow on Greenameyer's F-104, unbeknownst to the Air Force.

[Bigger Al]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

When I was a kid my Grandmother and I bought several $5 certificates from Greenamayer that were supposed to be carried aloft during the altitude record attempt. After the destruction of the aircraft, he signed all of the certs and sent them back with letters of apology.
Now I gotta do some digging and see if I still have one of them.

[ebutner]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Anyone have pics of the plane? Like to see it.

Eric

[Stevo]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Do a google images search for "F-104 RB" and you'll get a couple... actually just follow THIS LINK. I'm sure there's got to be more pictures out there.

Edit... just came across ANOTHER PHOTO from a thread on F-16.net. This one shows the F-104 RB in flight... cool.

[SkyvanDelta]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

There's a very good write-up about it here (3 pages worth):

LINK: http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.c...3756/index.htm

That is a very good story on Darryls F104. Thanks for sharing.

Amazing that Darryl would risk his life flying so fast and so low in a scrapped built F104, merely to be be the person to hold the speed record.

From the story, it sounds like he had spent hundreds or thousands of hours flying them so he was familiar with testing them:

"Before becoming an experimental test pilot in fancier stuff, he was a production test pilot who flew more than 100 F-104s. "That kind of a job is essentially to nitpick about everything," he says. "I fired the guns, checked the radar, checked the max speed acceleration, the air conditioning, the emergency gear extension, literally everything except the ejection seat."

Darryl's drive for speed is like a focused radar machine that does not back off:

"when Greenamyer was trying to soup up his Grumman Bearcat for a go at the piston world record, he suspected that Pratt and Whitney, manufacturers of the engine, had done destruction tests on it. Indeed they had, but they were not willing to let Greenamyer have the data. "If you don't tell me," Greenamyer said, "I will have to find out for myself." Injecting nitromethane into his fuel and exceeding prescribed manifold pressure, he found out what he wanted to know by blowing up three engines, two of them in flight. On the worst occasion, from an altitude of 10,000 feet, he made it dead-stick nearly 40 miles back to a safe strip with 1,000 feet to spare."

Poor plane went from this

http://www.i-f-s.nl/civil/RedBaron7.jpg

to this

http://www.i-f-s.nl/civil/RedBaron10.jpg

Did Darryl fly his plane in the sport class in 2008 at Reno and how did he do?

Here is a link to a site with lots of pictures and model specs, The International F-104 Society:

http://www.i-f-s.nl/index12.htm

[stuntflyr]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

My Dad and two friends of his got a T-28A for $1500, and T-6G for $500 and a B-26C for $2500 from DM in 1958. Dad was not a buyer but one of the pilots and only mechanic. They sold the B-26 on site and flew the other two home to Illinois. The T-28A wasn't legal for license because it needed a new prop which was as expensive as the airplane so they flew it around for a couple of years in bare metal and no license. The T-6 they had painted and licensed and flew around for a long time. I had one of my first airplane rides in it at about 2 years old!

He said there were a bunch of P-63's there, about 5 were IRANed and painted, licensed and ready to fly bought on spec by a private party for around $5000. A couple were flyable but unlicensed, the rest were mothballed but all were for sale. The price for one of the IRANed but unlicensed one's was $3500, I think from a private individual also. There were vendors set up to do maintenance on the airplanes, oil and radiator stockers, etc on site to do whatever was needed to fly them out, too.

Jim Laugel was Dad's friend and one of the buyers and wanted the King Cobra because of the nice car doors and sleek lines. I guess the price was too dear because he never did buy one!

[MerlinV12]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Is their any video footage of the f104 rb?

[Flyer57]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Two things.
One, look up the CAF. They bought the first aircraft in their inventory at Litchfield NAS when the scrapping started in earnest.
They came in as bidders at the auction and found two Bearcats that were able to be made flyable.
The price of Alum. was a known factor so they went back to their hotel and sat down and figured out how much the Cat weighed, then knew what the scrappers would be bidding and got the planes for somewhere around $100 more than the scrappers bid.
Then they went to the scrappers and got parts they needed for the two Cats for pennies, put the planes together and flew them home.
This started the Confederate Air Force.
Lefty Gardener bought White Lightning in a similar manner from the Air Force.
I worked with a coupole of these guys from Texas When I was at Sheppard AFB and just for helping them for a couple of weeks on a B-25. Now called Bandito, they took me to the Waco Air Show took care of my room and my food for the whole weekend.
You won't get that from the CAF these days.

Two. I met Daryl in Scottsdale when we had BMB in Larry's hangar.
He was interested in buying it. This was before Dwelle had it.
He was a really easy guy to talk to. But then having talked to the veteran Test Pilots I have been privilaged to talk to, they are in it to fly. They are not premadonnas. They don't talk down to the lowly mechanic.
Skip Holm asked me questions about BMB before he flew it off to the second owner. Then he listend to me like it was a briefing. It makes you understand that the real pros know that the guy that turns the wrenches is the guy to thank. Not like so many of the rich boys who buy into the sport.
Daryl is a great pilot and in my esperience, a great guy.
I was just the guy in the hangar and he sat with me and we talked about he plane and he never once expressed disappointment at not being able to talk to the owner of the plane.
Now I know why Ike wanted Test Pilots to fly the first space missions.
Oh and I think they know a thing or two about

[flyingjibus]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

I have part of RB-104 in my living room!

My uncle has a 4360, I dont know where he got it but I think it was an aution of some sort.

[stuntflyr]

Re: Did anyone here buy Surplus Airplanes or Engines from the Military?

Lefty Gardner and Lloyd Nolan did not buy N25Y from the Air Force!
It was surplussed in 1946 and was owned through the forties by JD Reed of Houston.