Pilots

What do you get when you combine a creative talent for electrical engineering with a love of flying? You get artistic urges, that's what. And if you happen to be John W. Wood Jr., you express those urges by building furniture.

Furniture? Well, yes, but not just any old furniture. Wood, the holder of several patents and the CEO of a booming high-tech firm located outside of Boston, crafts furniture from old airplane cockpits. Visitors to his office are likely to do a double take, until they realize that what appears to be a misplaced airplane simulator is actually Wood's desk. Assembled from the remains of a Grumman Albatross once stored in the Arizona desert, it has been transformed into a contrivance that only a pilot could love. Every knob, dial, and lever has been pain-stakingly restored to new condition. Painted surfaces gleam in a pale blue color matched to Grumman's original; and with a flip of the master switch, an integral 28-volt DC electrical supply lets Wood power up the backlighted instruments for flights of fancy whenever the mood strikes. A glass desktop supplies a generous workspace for more serious endeavors, at the same time allowing an unimpeded view of the entire cockpit — from the working rudder pedals to the overhead panel switches.

Does having a cockpit for a desk inspire Wood to work harder or merely cause him to daydream more often about flying? "The joke around here when it first arrived was that I could no longer shut my door, since no one would know if I was working or not. Actually, though, you get used to it quickly. Mostly I don't think about it until I see the reactions of first-time visitors." Invariably, those visitors end up taking a turn at the controls, and Wood gets to talk about one of his favorite subjects — flying.

Having built other cockpit-based pieces, ranging from coffee tables to wall hangings, Wood admits his pastime is a bit unusual. But it satisfies his natural desire to be inventive in a way that is lacking in his professional life now that he is the man at the top. "Nowadays in management I spend a lot of time on the telephone, just talking with people or shuffling papers. It's nice to get back to the kind of hands-on project where there is no delayed gratification. I can work for two hours and see the immediate fruits of my efforts." He has fended off numerous offers from persons wishing to purchase his designs, saying he has no interest in turning his hobby into another business. If they were for sale, though, the pieces would likely command hefty prices. In building the Albatross desk, for instance, Wood invested $6,500 for parts and an additional 800 hours of his own labor, spread over two years.

Wood scours the aircraft boneyards of the desert Southwest in search of the perfect raw materials to use for his projects. When business calls in that part of the country, he squeezes time from his schedule to hunt for cockpits that in his mind's eye show potential as household or office furnishings. Large military aircraft, like the Albatross he located at a salvage yard near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, are good candidates. Besides being roomy, the avionics found in their cockpits are often "boat anchor" quality, he says, making them a more cost-effective option for his purposes than retired airliners, whose instruments are more valued in the used avionics market. After the price is settled, the cockpit section of the aircraft is unceremoniously sawed free by workers, crated, and shipped to Wood's home in Concord, Massachusetts. There, "an understanding wife and family" watch as he transforms what appears to be a piece of jagged aircraft wreckage into something more akin to a work of art. His efforts include a coffee table made from the cockpit of a 1952 Convair T-29 and a wall hanging designed around a KC-97 instrument panel. So far, he has avoided using general aviation cockpits, mostly because they are not large enough for the kinds of furniture he likes to build.

One can tell a lot about a pilot by the entries in his logbook, and Wood's reveals a person who is intrigued by the adventure and variety of flight, any kind of flight. His 2,000-plus hours flown over the past three decades include experience in 53 different aircraft types. Garden-variety Cessnas, Mooneys, and Pipers appear along with such aircraft as a Twin Beech on floats, a Tiger Moth, a Vultee Valiant, several turboprops, and various hot air balloons and gliders. In the course of acquiring those hours, he has flown to more than 400 different sites in 44 states and 11 foreign countries. Wood is co-owner of a Baron, which he flies primarily for pleasure about 200 hours a year. But having been bitten in the past by the turboprop bug, he is thinking about trading up to a King Air or similar twin with all-weather capability, an important consideration in the northeastern part of the country. "I'll probably fly it a little less than the Baron each year because of its higher operating costs," he says. "But I'll be able to use it more often for business travel."

Meanwhile, when he's not out flying, Wood will be the first to admit that some desk jobs are infinitely more interesting than others.