N7079G, Sexy Sue wing spar repair

Hi Darcy,

I was referred to you by Martin Simpson in England last week. We have a beautiful On Mark A26 N7079G "Sexy Sue" based in Renton in the Seattle area and though I've not met Martin I feel like I've come to know him from our passion for these planes. I'm half British (my dad) half American (my mom) and we have a farm in Suffolk England which has been in our family for almost 100 years and we visit there 3x a year so I often email or talk with Martin when we're there. He has an extraordinary website which is so cool and so big I usually get lost looking around on it, and Sexy Sue is one of the On Marks showcased on the site so you can see her there with some good photos I've sent Martin.

We've found a cracked Right rear spar on Sue and we could really use your help. I understand you're wary (or maybe weary) of giving free advice on A26s and I don't blame you one bit, but I would be delighted to pay you whatever you want to help us if you can and if it works for you. I'll try not make this email too long but I feel I'm going to have to go to work to talk you into helping us and I'd to at least explain who I am and how I operate, maybe I can have a reasonable chance of talking you into consulting to us... we really need it. If not I certainly will understand.

Aviation has been in the English side of my family for a very long time. My great grandfather Herbert Hambling started Imperial Airways in 1924 and was made a Baronet for it, the winged crest which was given to him for that by King George is next to the air stair door on our Invader. Imperial Airways became BOAC in the 1930s and my godfather Alan Campbell-Orde laid out all of the overseas routes for BOAC in their early years. My dad Hugh Hambling was an RAF Atlantic Ferry Command pilot in WWII based in Dorval Montreal flying B24s and B25s across the Atlantic to Europe, North Africa, and the Far East. My dad's sister Margot became a pilot at 19 (in a Puss Moth) and ran in those circles, one of her friends being Alex Henshaw one of Supermarine's Spitfire test pilots, and with one of her boyfriends she flew in and got my dad out of Vienna the day before the Nazis marched in, my uncle Maurice was chief test pilot on the Vickers Wellington bomber. After WWII my dad went to work for BOAC in 1949 and stayed until 1973 when he went to Royal Brunei for 22 years until he retired at 76.

We moved from England to Santa Monica in 1957 when I was 4 because at that time BOAC was buying Douglas DC7Cs, then a year later we moved to Seattle when BOAC started buying Boeing 707s. I grew up in Seattle and have lived here most of the time since then but we'd go to England every summer and in those days it was quite an experience: Northern Pacific train to San Francisco then United DC6 to New York then a BOAC DC7C or Britannia or VC10 or 707 to London, for a young lad it was an incredible experience which put airplanes and particularly radial engined transports in my bloodstream forever. I went up to the cockpit on all these flights and often met Jimmy Percy on the Atlantic run, he was chief pilot of BOAC at the time. You'll see some photos at the bottom of this email with the names of all these people and some others who have given me the love of flying and we now carry them with on Sue everywhere we go.

I've liked A26s since I first saw one when I was in Aero Engineering at UW here in Seattle in 1975. I ran the wind tunnel at UW and one of the guys working there Fred Johnsen was into them and would go to the local air shows where tankers such as from Conair would fly in. Fred wrote one of the little gems on A26s, that Tech Series book, with many of his photos that he took at that time. I didn't really know much about A26s but I just thought they were super pretty and very cool, and I liked the look of them. When our company began to do well I started thinking about buying an A26. I flew to Billings in 1998 with one my good flying friends Dave Menzimer (he now runs the FSDO here in Renton and his office is in charge of Sue) and looked at buying one of Denny Lynch's tankers "Fire Eaters" which was one of two in the movie "Always". I liked Denny but the plane was really beat and it looked like it would take a LOT of time and money to put it right so I passed on buying it. Then I looked at another tanker a few years later when I was towing gliders out of Ephrata, it was owned by a NW pilot Jerry Sater but it was the same thing, really beat. 11 years later in Feb 2009 after thinking about it all that time I remembered Denny also had a K model so I called and it turned out it was for sale so I went back to Billings to look at it, this time it was for for sale by Denny's son Randy since his dad had passed away. But it was the same story again, it had been sitting out for many years and looked very, very weathered (amazing someone had cajones big enough to a year later fly that plane out and all the way to Texas at that) so I passed on it yet again. So I called Fred yet again and he suggested I look for an On Mark. I'd always been interested in Mustangs and particularly Spitfires (the British in me), but I didn't like that you couldn't take anyone along for the fun, and I'd realized the same thing about A26 bombers you really couldn't take many people with you to share the thrill. I'd never heard about the On Marks so I got very interested in them because I realized they could carry a lot of people to share all the fun, so I went looking for one. One night milling around on the internet I found photos of a beautiful A26C completely polished and pristine and then the next night I found another one, this time an On Mark also gorgeous polished, and I was really taken with both of these planes. I tracked down where they lived and called the company in Van Nuys, they were both owned by Thermco which was Howard Keck and they'd both been restored and maintained by Matt Jackson. I started talking with Matt about restoring an On Mark and a month later he mentioned one he knew about in Guthrie OK that might be able to be bought. It turned out the timing was just right, and I went to see it in Las Cruces after Matt had flown it there from Guthrie to show it to me. At that time one of my best friends had gone under the knife for cancer (and we're about to lose him after a long struggle now) so when I saw Sue I thought it was the coolest, baddest, most bodacious, gorgeous, classiest plane I had ever seen, I realized these sort of things come along once in a lifetime, and I just caved in and bought her for $1.6M.. That was March 2009.

After I bought Sue I realized soon enough I needed spare parts and a full-time mechanic, but I hadn't met anyone in the warbird community I was very impressed wit, a lot of them seemed to have big egos, pompous indifference, regaling lots of stories and bravado, and a lot of them wore those dumb flight suits with name tags and sewn-on patches etc. I guess I just didn't feel like I fit in and that whole scene didn't seem very interesting to me. But I had an idea. A few years earlier I'd bought a Cessna 206 on floats which I had restored and one of the A/P guys I met during that complete overhaul was Brad Meeuwse a sharp 23 year old guy who was assigned to the job at Galvin at Boeing Field in Seattle. I'd observed he was a very careful and very methodical and thorough mechanic, and he was a dirt biker, a skater dude with a soul patch and faded jeans, and pretty cool.. I liked him and we kind of hit it off from the start. Then one day I flew with him on a test flight in the 206 and found he was also a very good pilot, and he told me he grew up in Indonesia flying 206s and Caravans for MAF and had started flying at 14. So it occurred to me I'd much rather take a smart, stoked, passionate fun young guy like this who was a very careful mechanic and a quick study, and offer him the job learning to take care of and fly an A26 even though he had no experience with warbirds or radials or any big plane stuff, instead of some experienced older guy who had become jaded and arrogant and worse yet, closed minded. I hired Brad full time as Chief Pilot and Mechanic right after that and it turned out to be a very smart decision. Matt Jackson and his guys referred to Brad somewhat condescendingly as in "...get your Cessna guy to do it"….but he is extraordinary and a VERY good young man in every way.

In the last four years Brad has got Sue running like a top and we have flown her almost every week usually flying 120-150 hours a year. We fly her for fun, we fly her for work and business, we fly auction flights and just take people up to share the experience with almost anyone who wants to go, we fly her in all sorts of weather, day and night, year round, on all sorts of cross country trips mostly throughout the Western USA, and last year we took her on 8 stops in 6 days across the USA to New Haven for an overnight and back, we take all sorts of people along for the ride, our family (3 sons 15, 19, and 21), their friends, our 2 dogs, I mean anyone goes with us. This Spring we flew her twice to SoCal putting 36h on her in two weeks. We don't do air shows we get too antsy sitting around and would rather fly, we don't do warbird stuff I just don't feel it's that interesting. We fly Sue like On Mark designed her for, and that is to take a bunch of folks up and have fun on the way to somewhere interesting. We put her to work, and she loves it. It is a complete blast and we have an absolute BALL doing it. Brad and I fly her as a crew, trading seats every other flight. We fly her ALL the time, we fly the pants off her. I feel it's an incredible honor to be able to own and operate such a fine airplane as she is, a real national treasure. I have 8000 photos of Sue and a fraction of that of my wife Lorrie

SO. We've found a crack in the right rear spar, so we're down, at 487h close to the 500h spar cap AD. On one hand I'm glad it's now because we're planning on flying her across the Atlantic next summer and probably keep on going likely all the way around the world, so better we find this now rather than later somewhere remote. On the other hand we have two of our boys at University in Montana Missoula and we've been flying Sue there every 2 months or so to visit them, and since this is their last year there it's sad not to be able to do that. At least until we get this fixed. So I'm asking, no actually I'm kind of begging you to help us, and if so I would be very grateful. I don't do deals, I don't spend my time chiseling, I don't waste my time driving down costs and saving money I'm not interested in that. Instead I focus on the positive creative side of things. I either get into something 110% and do it the right way or I don't do it at all, and anyone who knows me would tell you that whether it's in my company or with Sexy Sue. We run that plane top shelf, we don't cut corners, we don't do it later, we keep after it until we're sure, Sue is a national treasure and deserves to be babied because she's priceless. I think as they say you get what you pay for….I like experts and you are THE expert on A26s.

So how can I talk you into it? I don't know anything about you or your situation except from what I've heard from Martin and second hand via some of the Airspray guys like Zoltan. Ideally I'd like to fly you here to guide us through this wing removal and reattachment, and pick your brains on everything you know about A26s. I will pay you enough to make it worthwhile for you, something you'll look back on in 10 years and say yeah that was fun. If we bring you in it will be to accelerate the repair time so we can fly Sue at the earliest, because not flying her we're going nuts fast. If you'd rather consulting to us by telephone or email that's ok but not as good, although we could start with that and see if it fits you and us, sort of feel each other out as it were. I'd much prefer to have you with us here in Seattle, but either way tell me how you can or want to help and what you'll charge for it. Tell me how I can talk you into it.

I see this has turned into a super long email, forgive me for that…. I'm just trying my best to persuade you to help us.

with kind regards,

Peter


				Douglas A/B-26 Invader N7079G, Sexy Sue wing spar repair - August 2013



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