A field of Albatrosses

“I started reading some stuff, and next thing I’m daydreaming about…who knows what?” said Mike. His daydreams included acquiring a Grumman HU–16 Albatross amphibious flying boat. It would be the perfect aircraft to live on while doing underwater search and recovery, making Mike an aviation version of Jacques Cousteau.

“I’ve been a treasure hunter since I was a kid,” he said. “So, the idea of flying around and scuba diving and finding stuff, especially if it happened to be a World War II fighter, that’s right up my alley.”

Mike told his friends that he wanted an Albatross, and it didn’t take long to get a lead from his friend, Van, in the form of a 5 a.m. phone call. Mike had only gone to sleep at 2 a.m. after completing a late-night flight and was still groggy. “Van says, ‘Hey, what’s happening?’ I said, ‘Oh, just sleeping.’ He says, ‘Do you want seven Grumman Albatrosses?’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ He says, ‘All right. Call Kerry when you wake up. He’ll have the details.’ I hang up the phone and go back to sleep. Wake up about 10 in the morning, and I’m thinking that was a weird dream—or was that real? I looked at the phone, and sure enough, there was a call from Van. I’m like, oh, boy.”

The seven Albatrosses, sitting in storage in the Arizona desert, had all been converted to standard category G–111 models by Chalk’s International Airlines, making them highly prized compared to the military versions that operate in the experimental-exhibition or restricted categories. Although they had not flown in many years and were marked with Xs to be scrapped, Mike bought the airframes. The fuselages were too large and the wings too difficult to remove to make trailering the aircraft financially feasible, so he developed a plan to fly them to Barron Aviation Airport (MO11), his 2,600-foot-long grass runway airport in Perry, Missouri.

He purchased a Ford F-550 truck and a few trailers and loaded them with all the tools he thought he’d need and drove to Arizona. His “crew” initially consisted of himself and his then-girlfriend—and later his son, Dillon.

Mike’s first step was to trailer the badly deteriorated fabric-covered flight control surfaces from all seven Albatrosses back to Missouri to re-cover them in his well-equipped shop. Doing this all at once in an assembly line style process would take the least amount of time. He drove the flight controls back to Arizona and returned with the brakes and overhauled them all at the same time. This process continued with the wheel and tires, nose struts, and other components. “We did a lot of trips back and forth,” said Mike. “Went through 30 tires on the F-550.”

It took a year and a half of work before the first Albatross was ready to fly to Missouri. Dillon was the pilot, with one exception—landing on Barron Aviation’s short grass runway, where Mike did the flying. “He had more experience,” said Dillon, “and Dad also did the flight engineering, like rigging the pumps and breakers, throttle settings and props, and running the hydraulics.”

Despite a normal ground runup, the first Albatross they attempted to fly out of the desert started losing oil from the propeller hub not long after takeoff, forcing Dillon to turn around and land. Both propellers were trailered to Missouri and overhauled.

After successfully flying the first Albatross to Missouri, Mike and Dillon removed the engines and propellers and drove them back to Arizona to use on each subsequent Albatross—which they flew back every few weeks or months, depending on the weather. One of the airplanes earned the nickname Cactus Jack. “We lost both engines and had to deadstick it into the desert,” said Mike. Dillon, Mike, and the airplane were unharmed, but “the cactus didn’t fare that well,” he said.

The entire operation took two and a half years, during which time Mike constructed a second, 4,000-foot-long grass runway to more easily accommodate Albatrosses landing and, some day, taking off at his airport.

Mike has since retired, and Dillon now owns Barron Aviation (see “Brilliant Businessliner,” October 2024 AOPA Pilot). Mike’s plan is to restore the first Albatross he flew to Missouri and sell the rest. While that may sound like a lot of work to end up with one airplane, it’s allowing Mike to pursue his retirement dream of search and recovery from a spacious, historic flying boat—and save six Albatrosses that might otherwise have been lost forever in the Arizona desert.

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