Founding father

There was little use for most combat airplanes in the postwar years, so they were not stored safely away in hangars or barns. The hulks you’ll be working on were simply pushed aside into the jungles of New Guinea or bellied onto frozen lakes in Russia. So, when the remnants of, say, an F4U Corsair turns up in your shop—ravaged by 70 years of corrosion and vandalism, with large parts of it simply gone—where can you find the documentation you’ll need to restore and maintain it? No one involved in building military airplanes in the 1940s ever considered that those aircraft might be flying 80 years in the future. As the airplanes and, in many cases, the companies that built them, disappeared, the drawings, assembly instructions, manuals, and technical orders disappeared with them. At worst they were destroyed, at best merely scattered and no records kept.

Early in his career, as a 20-something restorer of P–40s at the Fagen Fighters World War II Museum, Eric Hokuf realized the importance of a centralized source of information. He was interested in not just aircraft drawings, but component documentation too—hardware, electrical components, engine detail. There’s nothing like trying to resurrect a partial and long-orphaned airplane to teach you just how many parts from different manufacturers go into one. When he and his partner Eric Trueblood established their own shop, AirCorps Aviation in Bemidji, Minnesota, Trueblood suggested they tackle the problem.

AirCorps Aviation established AirCorps Library and hired manager Ester Aube to oversee it. Today their archive contains 501,000 technical manuals, production drawings, and service bulletins covering aircraft, engines, propellers, avionics, armament, and more. For a small fee, someone interested in a P–47 tailwheel can search the library website and find the technical details necessary to rebuild or maintain one. Need to overhaul a Ranger 6-440C engine for a Fairchild PT–19 trainer? The Ranger, and the company that built them, has been gone since the Truman administration, but AirCorps Library has the manual for $15.

Where does Aube find the material? “Most of it comes to us,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a trunk-find of an old propeller manual, sometimes we get something monumental. The crown jewel of our collection came from a North American Aviation employee who worked at NAA’s Columbus, Ohio, plant. Ken Jungeberg rescued about 50,000 original pencil-on-vellum drawings of iconic North American designs like the P–51, B–25, and T–6 just before they were to be destroyed. He preserved them for 30 years and then donated them to us—an incredible gift.”

Of course, all these manuals and drawings were produced by people. While scanning and cataloging Jungeberg’s collection, Aube became fascinated by the personal stories. She unearthed one that found its way to me.

Every North American drawing is signed with the last name of the draftsman. With only that to go on, she set out to find as many of them, or their surviving family, as she could. One of the names she ran across on several drawings was “Prill.” Prill is not a common name, and she soon located Fred Prill’s son Bob. Fred had died, but Bob provided Aube details of his NAA career. Searching old NAA newsletters, she soon found a 1959 photo showing Prill, by then head of the engineering group for the T–39 Sabreliner, in front of a roomful of draftsmen, hunched over tables under fluorescent lights, penciling away at drawings for the airplane. At his side, unnamed in the caption, was another suit-and-tie engineer. I knew that guy. Neal Scott. My father.

Ken Scott is an aviation writer and frequent contributor to AOPA Pilot.

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