Labor of love: Affection for aviation, Piedmont Airlines draws volunteers to plane-restoration effort

A World War II-era DC-3 passenger plane sags in the dust of the cavernous back shop of the N.C. Transportation Museum.

The battered fuselage bears the once-familiar colors of Piedmont Airlines.

The aircraft's major parts — wings, stabilizer, the central wing assembly and engine mounts — lie scattered in the dust.

"Potomac Pacemaker" remains stenciled in blue letters along the cabin doors.

The airplane is dirty, dented and stripped bare, revealing the decades it spent as a castaway, then perched outside at a Durham museum, weathering in the sun and rain as schoolchildren and families tramped through its aging and tattered cabin.

"When I first saw the airplane," said Robert Reed, restoration-project manager, "I thought, man, that'll never be restored."

But on the third Saturday of every month, a few determined volunteers converge in the dusty, unheated, almost primitive expanse of the back shop — where railroad mechanics once toiled on steam locomotives — to work on the Potomac Pacemaker. It was one of Piedmont Airlines' first passenger planes, and the restoration workers hope it will eventually look as it did when it shuttled across the skies of the South.

From a list of nearly 30 volunteers, about a dozen appear on any given Saturday to turn a screwdriver, pound a wrench and inhale the brown dust drifting down from century-old rafters. They are drawn by a love of airplanes, history and an airline that taxied its final runway in 1989. Many of them worked for Piedmont.

Tim Howard knelt over an aluminum cabin door — oval and curved like a potato chip — and labored to remove screws and rivets securing the skin to the door frame. Studying to earn an airframe and power plant mechanic's license at Guilford Technical Community College, Howard is using the old DC-3 to learn about an earlier technology.

"My dad and my grandfather both worked for Piedmont," he said, laying his screwdriver aside. "My grandfather, Bill Howard, was the last CEO."

Working on the other side of the old door, Charlie Hall carefully positioned a drill bit in the center of the rivet and pulled the trigger on an electric hand drill.

"I spent 33 years at Piedmont in customer service," Hall said. After retirement, he built his own airplane and, wanting to do his own maintenance, earned a mechanic's license. Hall now works as a lab tech in the aviation program at GTCC.

Working under the tail of the airplane was Perry Miller, a mechanic for US Airways.

"My father and my uncle have flown this airplane," Miller said. "I've been around airplanes all my life."

Miller fills his spare hours working on his own cars, including three vintage MG sports cars, and airplanes. Both of his brothers are commercial pilots, and Miller maintains and flies his own plane.

"Other guys where I work are burned out, and they won't touch an airplane outside of work," Miller said. "But I love working on airplanes. I've never really worked on a DC-3 before. I'll be glad to see this one coming together."

At the front end of the airplane, a scrap of green padding flew out the cockpit window, slipping down the sides to land in a heap on the dirt floor.

Martha Jackson, wearing denim overalls and a cotton face mask, was on a search-and-destroy mission to rip out all the padding from the plane's cockpit and cabin.

Jackson is a curator for the Division of State Historic Sites, which oversees 27 sites of historic significance across North Carolina. She was instrumental in finding the DC-3 and securing it for the Transportation Museum. Despite a lack of background in aviation or mechanics, she drove from her home in Raleigh to get first-hand experience in the messy work of gutting and restoring the plane.

"There's no way we could afford to have this done," Jackson said. "It's been a fascinating process. You just have to eat the elephant one bite at a time."

Just then Carly Faulkner, a tall, lanky woman from Lewisville, strode across the floor toward the center section of the main wings and engine mounts.

Faulkner left her job as a model for a New York agency to enroll in aircraft mechanic's school at GTCC.

"I'm learning some old tricks and some new tricks from these fellows," she said. "It feels good to talk to them and learn what the industry used to be like."

Her slender build allows her to squeeze into tight interior spaces beyond the reach of bulkier colleagues. She knelt, ducked beneath the edge of the wing, twisted her shoulders and vanished like a wisp of smoke inside the aircraft.

Nearby, former Piedmont employee Andy Ray, his arm in a sling, confers with other volunteers. He's temporarily limited to passing tools and advice.

Ray extracted a Tab cola can and a mummified bird during a previous work session in the aircraft cabin, to add to the ticket stubs and a brochure for the 1962 Wilmington Azalea Festival found earlier under the floor.

"My first airplane ride was in a Piedmont DC-3," Ray recalled, "and there's a 1-in-8 chance it was this one. My father paid $21 to fly my parents and me from Fayetteville to Southern Pines one Sunday afternoon to have lunch, visit relatives and fly back."

Ray built model airplanes as a boy, including the DC-3. "It's fun to be able to do the same thing with a real plane as you did when you were a kid," he said.

Robert Reed estimates it will take about five years to get the plane back together, with steady work from the volunteers and donations through the museum. The goal is to display the assembled airplane in the restored back shop so that visitors will be able to see the Potomac Pacemaker the way it looked when it was in service.

"These people are here because of a love of aviation and a love of Piedmont," Byrd said.

"It's a labor of love for most of us."

drolfe@wsjournal.com

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