Monday, November 09, 2015

Airplane restoration becomes chance to honor veterans

Gary Norville, owner of American Aero Services located at the New Smyrna Beach Municipal Airport, poses next to a B-25 Mitchell bomber, one of the military airplanes restored by his company. A documentary produced by Daytona State College that debuts Wednesday, Veterans Day, followed the company's efforts to restore a P-51 Mustang fighter. 


Restoration work can be slow. Just ask Gary Norville, owner of American Aero Services, the New Smyrna Beach company known for outfitting post war-era aircraft.

Inside the crowded hangar where Norville stands, a B-25 Mitchell bomber at rest beside him is where the work of rebuilding military planes was chronicled for a documentary produced by the Daytona State College-owned DSC-TV.

“Then this one is a North American AT-6, which was a trainer that pilots were trained in before they'd go into a P-40 or a fighter or a Mustang,” Norville says as he moves through the shop floor.

Producers of the film, "Wings of Victory: Keeping Our Warbirds Flying," say the entire production lasted almost a year, mostly following the incremental progress on the restoration of the P-51 Mustang, a long-range fighter aircraft.

The plane is not complete today and will not be for some time, Norville said. But it serves as one of the leading subjects in the documentary, alongside stories about war veterans and mechanical ingenuity and American history. The one-hour film will air Wednesday to coincide with Veterans Day.

Most of Norville's “warbirds” are rebuilt to fly. “Right now, 99 percent of our work is airworthy work,” he said. He has seen the company's operations grow from a 10,000-square-foot workspace when he bought the company in 1998 to its current size of about 28,000 square feet.

Norville caught the aviation bug during weekend flights with an uncle growing up in West Nyack, N.Y., a tiny hamlet west of the Hudson River.

He was driving tow trucks on the Tappan Zee Bridge when his father told him, “'You have to do something with your life,'” Norville recalled. He thought to himself: “ 'Well, I like airplanes. I'll become an airframe and power plant mechanic.' ”

Norville went to school in Tulsa, Okla. That's where he met George Baker, the previous owner of American Aero Services, who would be his future boss in Florida.

The nonprofit Collings Foundation has long been the company's primary customer since American Aero Services began performing the winter maintenance on the organization's fleet of military aircraft and servicing other vehicles.

The Mustang also belongs to the Stow, Mass.-based organization, as well. But the work needed was more than just routine upkeep. Another company started the restoration.

“When we got the project it was essentially a shell. No systems, no internals,” said Ashley Ezell, one of Norville's 18 employees. Ezell, 45, of New Smyrna Beach, essentially serves as project manager on the Mustang recovery job.

A “full-on restoration” can take three to four years, Ezell said, if you source all the materials from one place.

But they've been able to buy pieces from around the country: “The wing was built by a guy in South Dakota," Ezell said. "The fuselage was built by a guy in California. The tail was built by another guy in South Dakota. The engine's built by a guy in Michigan.”

What they couldn't find, they fabricated themselves, he said. “For a Mustang, in this business there's a lot of support because there are so many of them flying there's a good market for parts.”

The documentary picks up in the early stages of the project. “And we followed that and the goal is to try and see that plane fly,” said Kevin Lordan, who produced the film, “but, unfortunately, they didn't get it finished.”

They were supposed to finish in July, Lordan said, but delays held up the job.

“We followed the progress of the aircraft until the mating of the wing section and that was about two weeks ago,” Lordan said. They plan to follow up when the aircraft makes its maiden voyage when it's turned over to the Collings Foundation.

While shooting, Lordan said he met more and more veterans, each with their own harrowing tales of being shot down while flying.

“It started out with the airplanes,” he said, “and it kind of turned into wanting to sort of tell some of these stories of these veterans who survived the war.”

See more at:  http://www.news-journalonline.com

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