Thursday, January 20, 2000
By JUDD SLIVKA SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
They're called warbirds.
But they all have their own names: Phantoms and Corsairs and Camels and Spitfires and Emils.
Go to an air show, go to the Museum of Flight and listen to the old men who take their grandchildren by the hand and run fingers over the leading edge of a familiar wing.
"This is what grandpa flew in the war."
Warbirds -- classic military aircraft -- are big business. And Seattle's Museum of Flight, the largest aerospace museum on the West Coast, just acquired the rights to 33 more of them, which will give it one of the world's largest private warbird collections -- 155 in all.
Because of its extensive holdings of World War I-era planes, the fighter collection at the Champlin Fighter Aircraft Museum in Mesa, Ariz., has been the envy of aerospace museums around the world since it opened in the early 1980s.
But it was the Museum of Flight that acquired the collection earlier this month in not-quite-secret-but-still-very-quiet negotiations. Museum director Ralph Bufano began laying the groundwork for the purchase four years ago.
"Ralph was down here for a seminar," said Doug Champlin, the Arizona businessman who has spent the last 20 years buying and restoring vintage fighters. "He mentioned that he'd like to get his hands on the collection one day. That planted the bug."
After a year of negotiations, the Museum of Flight agreed to buy the planes for an undisclosed sum. It will pay for them out of a $100 million capital-improvement campaign likely to start later this year.
The fighter purchase will be the centerpiece of the museum's expansion on six acres slightly to the north and west of the current facility. The land was donated by The Boeing Co. last October.
"It's a marvelous adjunct to the collection we already have," museum spokeswoman Hollis Palmer said. "We have a good collection of commercial transport aircraft. But this will give us a good fighter collection to add to it."
The Champlin collection includes a Sopwith f-1 Camel, the World War I biplane made famous by Triple Entente pilots -- and cartoon character Snoopy -- in dogfights against the Red Baron and other German pilots. For the last 10 years, the museum staff has been restoring a Nieuport Type 28 found in original condition and used in the 1930 Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., film "Dawn Patrol."
The collection also includes a Messerschmitt BF-109E-3 and a Focke Wulf 190D-13, both workhorses of the World War II German Luftwaffe.
The Messercschmitt model, a variant of the Me-109, was made famous by Nazi ace Eric Hartmann, who shot down no fewer than 352 Allied planes while flying Me-109s. Champlin also has a Supermarine Mk IX Spitfire, the 1943 update of the Royal Air Force plane that helped win the Battle of Britain in 1940.
And there is the U.S. Navy F2G-1 Super Corsair, the first plane that Champlin bought more than 20 years ago.
"My father was one of the early aviators," he said yesterday. "Not a military aviator, but involved in oil and gas exploration. He used to bring home to dinner all the famous, early pilots, and I was just fascinated by them."
That fascination grew into his aircraft collection, which he moved from Oklahoma to Arizona in 1981 to attract more tourists. He settled at Falcon Field in Mesa, in two World War II hangars that once housed training planes for British pilots.
But as the Phoenix area has grown to the north -- away from Mesa -- the museum at 3636 Fighter Aces Drive has had trouble luring visitors away from the lush, championship golf courses and resorts of the Scottsdale area.
"When attendance flattened, I hired consultants to come in and see what they could do to improve things," Champlin said, sounding apologetic. "It became obvious four years ago what I had to do."
The answer -- sadly, for Arizona warbird buffs who wanted to relocate the collection to Scottsdale -- was to sell the collection.
"Other than my three little girls -- my family is my most important legacy -- the collection is the most important thing for me to leave behind. This is the best way I could think of to keep the collection together, even to keep growing it."
The Museum of Flight has 122 aircraft and spacecraft in its collection, including the original Air Force One and a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, once the fastest plane in the world. Because of space restrictions, only about 58 of the collection's aircraft are displayed at any time.
This is not uncommon among aerospace museums. The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum -- the nation's pre-eminent airplane collection -- only displays 65 of 356 aircraft at its Washington, D.C. museum. It displays another 140 planes and spacecraft at its Paul E. Garber Facility in Suitland, Md.
And by the time the Seattle museum is ready for the Champlin collection, it may have a few more planes to deal with.
"I found a plane, an American fighter plane, in Siberia last year," Champlin said. "It's in the Czech Republic now being restored. I started the collection because I enjoyed restoring the planes. I'm not planning on stopping."
------------------------------------------------------------------------Champlin planes
World War I: Sopwith Pup Sopwith Tri Plane Sopwith f-1 Camel Sopwith Snipe Fokker Eindecker E III Fokker DR I Fokker D VII Fokker DVIII S.E.A. 5a Nieuport Type 27 Aviatik D1 Rumpler Taube S.P.A.D. XIII Albatross D Va Pfatz D XII Nieuport Type 28 (under construction) World War II: Messerschmitt BF-109E-3 Focke Wulf 190D13 Supermarine Mk IX Spitfire Curtiss P-40N Warhawk Goodyear F2g-1 Super Corsair Republic P-47D-2-RE Thunderbolt Lockheed P-38L Lightning Yakolev Yak-9 Kawanishi "George" Jet Aircraft: MiG-21 McDonnell-Douglas F-4N Phantom MiG-15 MiG-17 F-86 Sabre
P-I reporter Judd Slivka can be reached at 206-448-8127 or juddslivka.@seattle-pi.com
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