ww1 replica aircraft for sale

Ww1 Replica Aircraft For Sale - Robert Basley receives no incoming traffic. It also receives no traffic from cars. Or even air traffic, despite the grass runway at his shop. But operating largely alone in a remote outpost an hour east of Kansas City, Missouri, accessible only by a gravel road that winds past cornfields and a gun club, Basley is the king of World War I-like industry.

World War I flying planes come in three levels of accuracy. The most authentic are the original aircraft, which are extremely rare and almost immeasurably valuable. For example, Javier Arango's aircraft collection in California (see Perfect Specimens, February/March 2013) includes two originals, a 1917 Sopwith Camel and a 1911 Blériot. The next highest are reproductions carefully crafted from wood, to mimic not only the dimensions but also the construction philosophy and flight characteristics of the real thing. (Such a level is represented by the other 21 planes in the aircraft collection. Arango's goal is to experience what it was like to fly these planes a century ago.) The most common and cheapest are replicas, such as Baslee's, made of metal and designed to evoke the lore and recreate the shape but not the flying qualities of the originals.

Ww1 Replica Aircraft For Sale

In total, there can be no more than 150 WW1-type aircraft flying in the world. Baslee has built over 30 of these, and customers have assembled another 50 or 60 of his kits. "It's not a huge market," he says with a friendly smile as he rivets some aluminum tubing into a wing rib for a 7/8 scale Fokker triplane he's building in a shop barely big enough. "But I did it, I developed it, and now I own it."

Nieuport 17 Images, Stock Photos & Vectors

A burly 49-year-old, Basley is the perfect man for the role – an obsessive aviation geek and machinist who spent ten years working as a mechanical engineer. He grew up a few miles from his shop in rural Missouri with an interest in vintage airplanes and an affinity for crafts. As a child, he biked 12 miles to an airport to stare, and began building the Rand KR-2 from blueprints when he was 15. He drove solo on his 16th birthday and got his pilot's license shortly after turning 17.

Sharon Starks, who built Baslee's Morane-Saulnier L with her husband, demonstrated the umbrella-type aircraft, which she said "flies like a little ballerina."

Eric Presten peers over the wing of the massive Blériot airfield that he, his family and Baslee built in a month.

Baslee then embarked on a series of residential developments - VariEze, Long-EZ, Glasair, which he built with a partner - financing each new project by selling the old one. In 1988, he had a crazy thought: man, I'd like to build a triplane. Using photographs in his one-car garage, he built a full-scale aircraft that looked strikingly similar to Manfred von Richthofen's Fokker Dr.1. He then hitched it to a VW Rabbit and towed it to Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Living The Top Gun Dream, On A Budget

Baslee went home and started Airdrome Airplanes. The following year, while still working full-time as an engineer in the photo lab, he made his first sale: a three-quarter scale Fokker D.VIII kit. It wasn't until 1996 that he felt confident enough to buy a property that housed a purpose-built store and a private airport. In 1999, he finally quit his day job and devoted his professional life to World War I replicas.

The Airdrome Airplanes store is a sprawling space crammed floor to ceiling with stuff: a wing here, coils of cable there. Baslee has an impressive arsenal of equipment—everything from a computer-controlled plasma cutter to the lathes that preceded it—and he makes almost everything he needs in-house. But the secret of its success is its ability to reduce the complexity of the set.

Example: Baslee creates the French curve of a wing rib by bending aluminum tubes in a rudimentary but precise fixture he made from plywood 20 years ago. As we speak, he's installing wing fins for the triplane, riveting a curved 6061-T6 aluminum top section to a straight down tube so that the notches for the serrated trailing edges line up perfectly. If he had been working in wood, it would have taken a full day of painstaking work to properly shape each rib. Baslee knocks out two dozen metals in less than an hour, methodically like a robot working on an assembly line. "It's all about the process," he says without pause. "I'm really good at making things simple and easy to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat."

Airdrome Airplanes offers kits for 25 aircraft, ranging from a Blériot XI - the first plane to cross the English Channel - to a Sopwith Camel fighter similar to the one that shot down the Red Baron. They all share the same basic fuselage, wing structure and flight controls. Aside from the obvious cosmetic differences, the main differences are in size. "They're like Erector kits," Basley says.

Royal Aircraft Factory Se5a. Replica Of Succesful British First World War Scout And Fighter Editorial Stock Photo

While initially focusing on three-quarter scale kits, Baslee moved on to full-scale aircraft as available engines and pilots expanded. Almost all of its models fly under Federal Aviation Administration regulations for light sport aircraft. (The rest are considered ultralight.) Even the full-size replicas are significantly lighter than the originals. But fitted with modified Volkswagen two-stroke Rotax or Australian Rotec radial engines, the lookalikes benefit from power-to-weight ratios close to those of real World War I aircraft. "They're not meant to go fast," Basley says. "It's not about efficiency. They won't go anywhere. You fly it because you want the experience of flying old airplanes.

Depending on the aircraft, top speed is usually around 100 mph and performance is comparable to that of small tail tractors such as the Aeronca Champ. "With almost everything he builds, you can just hit the throttle, pull back on the stick and start flying," says Harvey Cleveland, who tests all of Baslee's prototypes. Customers are equally complementary. Sharon Starks built a Morane-Saulnier L with her husband, Dick, from an Airdrome Airplanes kit, saying, "She flies like a little ballerina."

While Baslee is passionate about his airplanes, his simple, highly structured and easily repeatable construction techniques are designed to make his business a money-making proposition rather than a labor of love. His kits sell from $3,500 (Dream Classic, inspired by the 1908 Santos-Dumont Demoiselle) to $15,000 (Sopwith Tabloid), excluding the engine, and to date he has sold more than 400 to customers in a dozen countries. He offers ready-made planes for $90,000 a piece and has built planes for the movie

Most of his clients are airline pilots and former military aviators—"I've had seven colonels here at one time," Basley says—so he rarely deals with empty-nesters. However, he stresses that building one of his kits doesn't require any special skills, such as welding. "You can take the delivery in the back of a pickup truck, take it to a cabin in the woods with no electricity, and assemble an airplane with a vise, a portable drill, a file, basic wrenches and a hammer," he says. "I've done everything else."

Fokker Dr1. Replica First World War Scout Fighter Aircraft Editorial Image

Retired Air Force Col. Blake Thomas, who flew the F-15 in combat, wanted the Nieuport 28 because it was the fighter his squadron flew during World War I. built the original airplane because it was a selling point,” he says, explaining why he chose to build an Airdrome Airplanes kit, which he outfitted with luxury items like cabin heaters and GPS. "I wanted something that flew like a modern airplane and didn't break down every two hours."

To ensure his planes are safe and reliable, Baslee easily deviates from the original specifications, producing a more forgiving airfoil or a stronger metal structure, repositioning the landing gear to adjust the center of gravity, and using rip-stop nylon. replaced by an added substance. It also adds brakes, steerable rear wheels and advanced flight controls. (De Blériot was an exception. “Now I know why we no longer use wing warping,” he says.)

Each kit contains approximately 4,000 parts, from pipes to bolts to wedges. The kits are divided into 12 sub-kits and the parts are numbered consecutively. So R1 is the first part in the rudder assembly, L6 is the sixth part in the landing gear assembly, and WG2 is the second bushing in the wing assembly. The kit comes with a DVD that shows the build and provides detailed instructions that begin with: “Choose your workspace wisely. If you're building [the plane] in a basement, make sure you have a window or door big enough to get the assembled parts out!”

Baslee says the sets can be completed in 400 to 600 hours. That seems optimistic. “Realistically,” says Thomas, “it's more like 950 to 1,000 hours.” But for those who want to speed things up or who aren't confident in their construction skills, Baslee offers a “builder's help” program that helps owners

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