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THE BIG SKY GANG Stewart Bailey, curator of the museum, and negotiated a deal: Get it out of the hangar, and it is yours. Sure, I would save the SAVES A CLASSIC Bamboo Bomber! I have a problem: When I see a derelict airplane I don’t see PIECE OF what is in front of me. I see it flying off into the sunset as a beau- AMERICAN tiful aircraft. The logistics of disassembling a larger than normal general aviation aircraft and transporting it 2400-miles back to AERONAUTICAL home base in Oregon didn’t seem to register with me at that moment. However, my daughter Becki loves an adventure with HISTORY Dad and she is handy with a wrench so we flew to Galveston to have a look. I was pleasantly surprised to find the UC-78 in pret- BY JOHN PIKE ty decent shape. The exposure to salt water was very limited and the fact it had been in a climate-controlled hangar had made a recently got a call from Jon Larson —also known as “Mr. Song Bird (by the way, Jon is the current custodian of Song Bird). Carefully lifting the fuselage from the wing. huge difference on how little it had deteriorated. Bamboo Bomber” because of his Cessna T-50 — of Auburn, The image of that “mini DC-3” always conjures up the romance The aircraft appeared to have gone Washington, who was in a bit of a panic. Jon had gotten of aviation that I felt as an impressionable young person. through a very expensive and professional word that a Cessna UC-78 “Bamboo Bomber” (named for It seems this Bomber was located in Galveston, Texas, at the restoration in 1993. The Bamboo had I been upgraded by STC to mount 300-hp its use of wood in the wings and empennage — it also had other old Lone Star Flight Museum facility — elevation six-feet above derogatory names such as “Useless 78”) was scheduled to be the Gulf waters. The airplane had been a victim of the 2008 Lycoming R-680-13 radials fitted with scrapped in a couple of weeks. Hurricane Ike, which had flooded the museum with a storm surge Hartzell feathering propellers. Un- Now, when anyone mentions a Cessna T-50/UC-78 my of eight-feet of water. The airplane was in maintenance and could fortunately, the engines and propellers heart kind of flutters and I get emotional. You see, I grew up not be flown out of harm’s way. It did manage to survive the didn’t come with the airplane. It has a watching the television series Sky King with Penny and the T-50 Consolidated PBY Catalina, which was floating in the museum beautiful interior, great looking instru- and banging into other airplanes. ment panel (less the flight instruments), Fortunately, after the floodwaters had and a well-done electrical system. receded, it appeared that some fabric When we entered the hangar we had been removed and the interior were slammed by the heat and humidity. washed with fresh water. The Bamboo We proceeded to disassemble the aircraft Bomber then sat neglected for ten- as far as we could — knowing we had to years in a climate controlled hangar. As John notes in the article — the time factor was absolutely essential in saving the get it out of the complex in two-days! The aircraft. In this photograph, Becki supervises the demating of the fuselage and wing. The Lone Star Flight Museum was building was to be transferred to a new relocated to Ellington near Houston owner and the Museum wanted the in a fabulous new facility that is Bomber to disappear. We were soaked to much less likely to ever be flooded by the skin with sweat as we removed the a hurricane. We made a call to empennage and started to disconnect cables and wires from the wings to the This is the Bamboo Bomber before Hurricane Ike — an absolutely pristine fuselage. Fortunately, the airport manager example of one of WWII’s most had an available empty box hangar that famous multi-engine trainers. we could rent for a month. We moved the airplane out of the old museum hangar Fortunately, the Bamboo Bomber is not a complex aircraft but it is labor intensive when it comes to disassembling. Note how the weather was worsening.

Becki with the now less than pristine UC-78. Fortunately after the flood, someone had sliced away the fuselage fabric and The Bamboo Bomber during one of its few poured fresh water onto post-restoration flights. At the time, the the structure — this helped aircraft was probably the finest to save the aircraft. restoration of a T-50/UC-78. (M. O’Leary) 6 AIR CLASSICS/February 2019 airclassicsnow.com 7