Pilots

It doesn't take a couch and a hundred bucks' worth of psychoanalysis to figure out Tim Paul's thought pattern. About every third minute it has something to do with an airplane. Always has and always will. Even when he's juggling work-related issues, like meeting a growing payroll or how best to manufacture a million special metal parts, he's thinking about landing gear and cruise props. Paul, 46, is just that kind of guy, a person with 80 octane running through his veins.

Spend a little time with Paul, a clever machinist and successful businessman, and you'll understand just how deep he's in. His office is a clutter of parts and neat stuff, that's easy enough to see. Sign of a busy person, some would say. But look closely. Under a customer's blueprints you'll find a Trade-A-Plane and a scattering of sketches that look suspiciously like wings. The artwork on the walls? All of it — and there's plenty — has two wings and visible jugs. Then there's the calendar of upcoming fly-ins and a layout of a Steen Skybolt, and it goes on and on. Paul's office feels good. It feels like flying feels.

As you get to know Tim Paul, you get to know what it is about aviation that makes him tick. It isn't flying. He logs three times what most pilots log in a year, and he enjoys every nautical mile. Yet it's the mechanical things that make flying possible that really grab his attention. The nuts, the bolts, the cables, and the wires. He can't get enough of those things — the things that, when put together, make an airplane.

Want more proof? Take a look at the framed photo of the green-on-white Stearman hanging on the office wall. Lean back and listen to Paul's story about that airplane, his airplane.

Picture an aviator wannabe, a kid long on gumption but short on cash. Picture a young Tim Paul, a college kid running his hands over dingy fabric, or what was left of it, covering the pieces and parts of a used-up Stearman. Like a spent mule, the tired duster was tucked away in a weathered Mississippi barn right where someone told Paul it would be.

Paul looked at beat-up metal and cloth. He saw his future, a fine trip around the countryside with a few hundred feet of nothing but air between his wings and the ground below. Paul touched rust and oil, but he felt a silk scarf flapping against his cheek and a heavy wood stick in his grip.

It was 1972 and Kent State student Tim Paul, like a lot of 21-year-olds, had the hots. But Paul's eyes were on the faded red curves of 5166N, a once-proud working lady he was falling for. Head over heels. As he dug through the pile that was once a military trainer and then a souped-up duster, Paul saw his prize as a soon-to-be showplane. He dug deep, investing his life savings in his future ride.

"I knew it was my opportunity to own a Stearman, and even if half of it was in baskets and boxes, I wanted it," he recalls.

But why a Stearman, a hulk of a machine among a much quicker fleet being touted by general aviation at the time? Because that's the way it works for aviators who love to aviate for the sheer pleasure of aviating.

It might have had something to do with Paul's first job, a part-time high school stint with a local contractor who owned a Stearman. Aviators already know how this part of the story goes.

Paul said he thinks it was the noise and fire of the engine and the fact that he could see and touch half of the ship's guts by exploring the exposed framework. He still loves the sound and smell of a radial. It's the kind of internal combustion that is perhaps more external than internal.

"I figured I could get the Stearman in the air in a few months," Paul recalls. But the reality of life has a way of tempering ambition. Paul added marriage, kids, and a career to the equation, things even nonaviators do, things that take priority over restoring airplanes.

Now fast-forward to the mid-1990s, a special time in Paul's life when his Stearman did in fact come to life, thanks to the skill and determination of a good friend. Those first few hours were the highest of highs for Paul. Except, perhaps, for the upending setback when he locked a brake and flipped the big bird. Just another reason, according to Paul, to wrench on the airplane. A reason he said, to make it that much better.

So what does a guy do with a grand old flying machine like that? Tim Paul uses it for business — or is it for fun? The business of making fun from a workday. Customers and business associates often make their visits to Paul's shop on sunny days. In that way, they're almost assured of a ride in 66N.

Paul, who owns a twin and a piece of another Stearman, is now building a Steen Skybolt, a two-seat aerobatic machine that he sees as the "ultimate learning experience." He's working with a retired master mechanic, the same close friend who helped him to complete the Stearman. They work on the Skybolt nearly every day. How is that possible? The Skybolt is right smack in the center of Paul's busy machine shop, in the same spot where 66N was born.

Believe this: Tim Paul is thinking about aviating right now.

Tim Paul's Stearman, along with his Beech Baron, was destroyed in a hangar fire on April 18. Just days before the fire, he had talked of visiting Oshkosh '97 and flying another multistate barnstorming tour of his customers. It would not be surprising to see Paul twisting wrenches on another Stearman project in the near future — Ed.