Pilotage

Mark R. Twombly co-owns a 1964 Piper Twin Comanche which is younger than the partners.

Whenever I begin to fret about the advancing age of our airplane — it is one birthday away from the big four-zero — I remind myself that the average age of a four-place general aviation single or twin is 33 years. (That was in 2002, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, so an additional wrinkle or two has appeared on the face of the fleet since then.)

When it comes to airplanes, however, age is in the eye of the beholder. As I look around the ramp I see lots of airplanes built in the 1960s and 1970s that appear to be half their age, or younger. Like A-list movie stars on the far side of 30, they look remarkably fit, attractive, and contemporary.

Stars achieve and maintain that look with the help of personal trainers, plastic surgery, and a closet full of haute couture. Airplanes come by it more naturally. Regular maintenance keeps an airplane fit to fly, but the look has a timeless quality. Most four- to six-place airplanes are designed with a similar mission in mind — to fly two to three miles per minute for three or four hours. That commonality of mission leads to a degree of commonality in design and appearance.

That is not to say a Mooney, Bonanza, single-engine Commander, and single-engine Cessna all look and perform alike. An emphasis on performance, economy, cabin size, benign handling, or even cost of production can drive the design and thus the appearance.

That is to say that a decades-old Mooney, Bonanza, Commander, or Cessna single looks remarkably similar to the ones emerging from the factory today. Even those dowdy, dated details on the older models, things like split windshields, small rear side windows, exposed hinges, and oversize engine cowls with gaping cooling inlets, can be brought up to date with aerodynamic and appearance modifications.

In that respect, an older airplane is more like a house than a car. A 40-year-old car is a toy, an enthusiast's passion to be tuned and polished and brought out of the garage on fair-weather weekends. Older cars are snapshots in time. Their design, technology, and performance reflect the thinking of the time. We like them for what they were, not what they could become.

A 40-year-old house, on the other hand, is a work in progress. Who wants to preserve the dated look and worn functionality of a house built in the mid-1960s? Periodic updates — remodeling the kitchen, enlarging the master bath, adding a media room, replacing the furniture, changing the landscaping — keep an older home feeling fresh and looking contemporary.

A work in progress also is an apt description of a general aviation airplane of average age or older. The label certainly fits ours. We've remodeled the kitchen (cockpit) and updated and added appliances (avionics), been to the furniture store (interior), put on new siding (engine cowls and various speed mods), and re-landscaped (bold new paint scheme). But, as with an older house, the work is never done.

Partner Rick telephoned the other day to talk about Wemacs, those clever little fresh-air vents you twist one way to open a disk shutter for airflow, and the opposite way to close. One of four Wemacs in our airplane works properly, and one doesn't work at all — we have to stuff a tissue in it to block the airflow.

The professional engineer in Rick will not let him ignore an imperfect mechanical device, no matter how small or insignificant. He removed and disassembled one Wemac to learn its secrets, then tried to order parts. No luck — the Wemac woman said she needed a part number, and who knows what that would be for an airplane that has been out of production for more than three decades.

Further action is pending on the Wemacs.

Same with the engine instruments. The cylinder head temperature gauge for the right engine was inoperative. We couldn't simply replace it with a new CHT gauge because they are built as a cluster. It was a moot point anyhow because the instruments no longer are available from the manufacturer. Our mechanic sent the cluster out for overhaul. Several hundred dollars later, the needle on the offending CHT now nestles just to the left of the red line, a reading that we know is grossly inaccurate.

We've had better success with the little plastic switches for the overhead map and dome lights. Several were inoperative, or almost so. Rick painstakingly dissected one (can you believe it?), spent hours searching for parts, and ended up replacing them for $50 a pop. Expensive, but now at least the lights turn on and off.

We're waiting for the next age-related creak or groan. The wiring is a good candidate because we've already had a problem with brittle wiring for the gear-down indicator lights. Or, it might be the old-school generators, three of which we've replaced already.

The major projects on an older airplane, and house, are easy to identify, plan for, and track. It's the little things, the stuff we overlook or take for granted, that pop up on the squawk list to occasionally remind us that beneath its attractive, contemporary exterior lives an almost forty-something.