Grounded perfection

But the FAA regarded the 1977 PA–18 restored by former CubCrafters Maintenance Director Stan Franz as an elaborate fraud and deemed it unairworthy.

It accused the airplane’s owner, well-known Alaska bush pilot Roger Christensen, of falsifying logbooks and other official documents. To the FAA, N82371 was an imposter that had illegally assumed the identity of a PA–18 that had been damaged in Alaska during a taxi accident.

The shiny new N82371 took on the forlorn airplane’s N number, data plate, and logbooks—but it retained no structural parts from the original and, according to the agency’s internal guidance, shouldn’t be identified as the same airplane. Resolving the dispute would take two years, a trial, and about $50,000 in legal fees. In the end, however, the administrative law judge’s ruling would ultimately vindicate Christensen and deliver an expansive view of the scope of work that restorers can perform.

“The process of getting to this point has been complicated, stressful, and quite bewildering,” said Christensen, an 84-year-old retired custom homebuilder living in Oak Harbor, Washington. “I’ve been flying for more than 60 years and always treated people well and honestly, and I certainly never sought to deceive anyone.

“I’ve made lifelong friends and had some incredible experiences through my long involvement in flying,” he said. “To have all that turned upside down and be accused by the FAA of being dishonest, well, that really came as a complete surprise.”

Taxi troubles

The airplane at the center of the dispute is a stock, 150-horsepower Piper PA–18 built at the company’s Vero Beach, Florida, factory in 1977 before it made its way to Alaska.

A 1,200-hour private pilot was taxiing the airplane to a tiedown spot at the airport in Palmer on August 29, 2016, when he made a series of errors that extensively damaged the aircraft, engine, and propeller.

“He stated he got too close to the alders and clipped his wing,” an FAA report said. “He gave full rudder and increased power to compensate. This caused the aircraft to hit a rut in the dirt and send him on a path through the trees, ending up nose down against a tree.”

The bruised aircraft remained on the FAA registry, and some components were parted out and sold individually. Because of the prop strike, the engine was sent out for overhaul. The Super Cub’s wings were damaged, and the fuselage was bent and would have to be straightened in a jig and the fabric replaced before it could fly again.

Christensen spent summers flying as a wilderness guide in Alaska and had extensive experience flying PA–18s there as well as many other bush airplanes. He specialized in ferrying airplanes between Alaska and the lower 48 states and had made about 88 one-way trips across Canada. Many of them were done with, or for, CubCrafters founder Jim Richmond, a close friend.

“I’d logged more than 6,000 flight hours in Super Cubs over the years and absolutely loved them,” Christensen said. “When I wasn’t flying Super Cubs, I worked on them, and they were one of the few airplanes I felt like I just deeply understood. They’re such mechanically simple airplanes that they just make sense to a guy like me who’s not an A&P mechanic.”

Over the years, Christensen had purchased many damaged Super Cubs, one at a time, and helped restore them at his construction shop in Washington.

“My business was building custom homes, and I worked very hard and supported my family my whole adult life doing that,” he said. “Working on Super Cubs was a fun diversion. It was relaxing, and it wasn’t meant for profit. It was a way to learn, and the knowledge I gained by doing it made me a better pilot and guide.”

Christensen heard about N82371—the damaged airplane in Palmer—and bought it from an Alaska aircraft salvage firm. He bought the entire airplane but didn’t want to transport the whole thing back to Washington. He knew, for example, that he’d replace the fuselage with a new one from Univair that would allow him to increase the gross weight to 2,000 pounds. He also knew he’d replace the damaged wings, so he didn’t need those bulky, expensive-to-ship parts.

He got the logbooks, data plate, and smaller parts boxed and shipped to Washington. There, licensed mechanics would oversee the work that Christensen performed and sign it off. Christensen said they offered to vouch for his supervised practical experience, too, so that he could become a rated aircraft mechanic, but he never took that step.

“I was building houses and flying and raising kids and never felt I had time to pursue an A&P rating myself,” he said. “I didn’t have any ambitions beyond going out to the construction shop at the end of the day and making a wing rib or two.”

N82371 was meant to be the culmination of everything Christensen had learned about Super Cubs across more than a half-century of flying them.

“When you spend thousands of hours flying an airplane as slow as a Super Cub, it gives you time to think about ways to make it better,” he said. “I had lots of ideas for ways to make this one absolutely perfect for me.”

A 180-horsepower engine, Hartzell constant-speed prop, double-slotted flaps, extended landing gear, vortex generators, a belly pod with extra fuel, a Garmin G3X primary flight display, additional storage space, and custom seats were all on the list.

After Christensen performed some of the restoration work himself under supervision, he handed the entire project over to his friend Franz, CubCrafters’s original mechanic whom he’d known for decades. Franz would spend the next two years finishing N82371 using all FAA-PMA parts, many of which are available under CubCrafters
supplemental type certificates (STCs).

And that, it turned out, was the rub.

Grounded and fined

“We recently conducted a re-examination inspection of your aircraft,” the March 2, 2022, registered letter from the FAA informed Christensen. “As a result of the re-examination, it appears that the aircraft presented for inspection is not the same aircraft that was manufactured by Piper Aircraft Corporation …. Therefore, the identification plate, airworthiness certificate, and registration markings were not eligible for placement on the inspection aircraft.”

The FAA had taken a hard look at N82371 and determined that none of the structural, load-bearing parts were original to the 1977 aircraft. According to the FAA’s internal guidance, aircraft lacking such original parts should be considered wholly different airplanes—not restorations or repairs.

The FAA accused Christensen of causing an A&P mechanic to falsify records claiming he had supervised Christensen’s work, and the agency proposed a civil penalty of $11,500 against Christensen. It also spelled out the agency position that N82371 was ineligible for a standard airworthiness certificate.

Christensen had several health setbacks that eventually convinced him to sell the airplane. But N82371 couldn’t be sold while its airworthiness status was in dispute. Brad Damm, a CubCrafters vice president, hired an aircraft mechanic with inspection authorization to determine whether it was airworthy. Finding nothing wrong with the airplane or its records, Damm notified the FAA of his intention to perform a series of test flights. The FAA responded with an emergency revocation of the airworthiness certificate grounding the airplane. That emergency action triggered an option for a hearing before an administrative law judge, and Christensen and CubCrafters were eager to resolve the matter. Christensen hired Ron Sprague, a Texas aviation lawyer, to present his case in Spokane, Washington.

After two days of testimony, Judge Darrell L. Fun ruled in favor of Christensen. The ruling found that, although damaged in a taxi accident, N82371 was never “scrapped.” The damage it suffered was repairable, and even though the majority of its parts were replaced and upgraded, that shouldn’t have caused the airplane to lose its identity. Also, the FAA’s internal guidance that restored aircraft must retain some load-bearing structures doesn’t apply to aircraft restorers, owners, pilots, and others outside the agency.

“It is completely permissible for a person to replace the wings and fuselage and any other part to increase the gross weight in accordance with an STC and at the same time replace the empennage and control surfaces using PMA parts as well as replacing the landing gear with another STC. In doing so, the final airplane would retain the original serial number and identification plate as a Super Cub, even though all primary structures had been replaced and there was no longer any original primary structure traceable back to Piper as the manufacturer,” the ruling said.

The judge criticized the FAA’s expert witness as “wavering, convoluted, confusing, illogical” and “not credible or persuasive.” He reversed the FAA’s emergency revocation and directed the agency to return the Super Cub’s unexpired airworthiness certificate.

N82371 was later sold to a Texas couple and has been flying there for the past two years. Christensen and the FAA agreed that the FAA wouldn’t appeal the judgment in exchange for Christensen declining to sue the FAA to recover his court costs.

Now, CubCrafters is preparing to offer a fuselage STC that will allow for gross weight increases up to 2,300 pounds. The company based in Yakima, Washington, plans to sell finished fuselages to Cub restorers around the world and refurbish existing airplanes in-house. Individual aircraft restorers also see the ruling as a common-sense way to improve the value and safety of refurbished airplanes.

“I’d rather have a new fuselage and the gross weight increase that comes with it than a damaged and repaired old one,” said Darin Meggers of Baker Air Service in Montana which specializes in restoring and upgrading Super Cubs. “Using new, FAA-approved parts is a common-sense way to produce better, safer airplanes.”

Instead of dancing around practices that were largely undefined and poorly understood, even by FAA regulators, the decision provides support to mechanics to evaluate the best course of action for each aircraft in their care.

“If it makes sense to replace the wings, fuselage, landing gear, or tail feathers, owners and restorers can make those decisions on their own merits,” Meggers said. “That’s the best possible outcome you could hope for in all this.”

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