COLUMN:

On a mission to bring WWII aviation history alive

By Tamara Moan

It’s bright and breezy on the old concrete runway outside Ford Island’s Hangar 79. It’s here that Syd Jones directs restoration work on vintage World War II airplanes. Many of those planes are now housed next door at Hangar 37 in the new Pacific Aviation Museum.

Jones is the tall, lanky cowboy of a figure standing in front of the hangar today, his straight brown hair whirled by the wind, his mouth quick to smile a greeting from beneath a mustache barely turning gray. He points out this hangar’s bullet-pocked windows, blue-tinted remnants of the action seen on Dec. 7, 1941 when Japanese fighter planes attacked Pearl Harbor. With the newer panes of uncolored glass, they form a checkerboard of history.

Syd and KT Jones are the busy hands bringing the Pacific Aviation Museum to life.

“This World War II period was a unique lens of time,” Jones says. “We have an opportunity here to touch an era that formed the world we have today.” Passing to the cool inside of the hangar with Jones, I look back out the door, directly at Kolekole Pass where Japanese planes appeared on that fateful day.

Jones ushers me over to a corner of the hangar and dusts off a chair. He’s got a laptop set up on a desk, the other corners of the room populated with cast-off office furniture. Jones is obviously in love with the history of his surroundings.

“This scruffy little office might have been some mechanic’s lair,” he says, patting the desk. “There was probably someone sitting right here that morning when the bullets came through those windows.”

History has always been the thing for Jones. His first career was in marine archeology. He and his wife Kathryn Budde-Jones, known as KT, were both involved with shipwreck salvage operations, working all over the Caribbean, Florida, off the coast of Georgia, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef recovering sunken Spanish galleons. Two of their largest projects were in the Florida Straits, recovering ships wrecked in 1622.

In 1980 they recovered $60 million worth of artifacts from the Santa Margarita. In 1985 they recovered the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, the largest Spanish galleon ever found with artifacts worth about $500 million.

The artifacts of the Spanish colonial era fascinated Jones and he loved researching the bits and pieces, and the puzzle work involved in reconstructing the ships of that time, the lives of sailors, and the uses of objects in daily life. The big drawback to working with items 300-400 years old was that the humans were all long dead.

Realizing their passion was for living history, Jones and his wife began to look for other watershed eras closer to their own time. They found another amazing age in the 20th century: the Second World War. “World War II transformed this country,” Jones points out. “The way people work today, the way countries interact, all the material products that developed during that time, even our going to the moon, it all grew out of that period.”

Jones, 55, was already a licensed pilot. His mother had taken flying lessons in Hawai‘i in the 1940s. His father and uncles had been pilots; one uncle was killed flying B-17s during the war. Flying was part of the family mythology. Jones first took lessons in the late 1970s, just after college. He flew recreationally and also used aviation for wreck site survey work.

Jones saw World War II vintage aircraft as the spot where his love of flying could marry his passion for history. “Here was an opportunity,” he says, “to meet people who’d actually designed the equipment – the planes, the tanks – and to work with the items themselves which in many cases were very rare.”

Once they’d honed in on warbird aviation, Jones and KT started hunting for projects or museums in which they could become involved. What they found was Tom Riley’s Flying Tigers Warbird Restoration Museum near Orlando, Fla. They both began working there as volunteers and were eventually hired as museum employees. In the late ‘80s, they sold their home in Key West and moved north.

The museum gave Jones a chance to work on many different types of planes and an opportunity to learn all kinds of restoration techniques. During his time at Tom Riley’s, he got his multi-engine license and began flying in air shows. After accumulating enough flying hours, he got the rating that allowed him to fly B-25s, his favorite plane to pilot.

Jones finds plane restoration work challenging but he says, “The machines are just hardware. They’re just like computers that are turned off. It’s the people who make it come alive.” Through his work Jones has met “a lot of famous and nameless people who were heroes.”

Among those is Gen. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. Tibbets and Jones became good friends and in 2005 Jones was one of the pilots flying in formation above Tibbets’ surprise 90th birthday party.

In 2004 Hurricane Charlie hit Florida and destroyed Tom Riley’s Flying Tigers Warbird Restoration Museum. Earlier KT had started doing PR work for other warbird organizations and she heard there might be an aviation museum project starting up in Hawai‘i. She and Jones dug deeper, contacted the organizers, and talked themselves into getting hired. They moved to Hawai‘i in 2005 and plunged right in. He’s director of the museum and she’s education director.

Restored B25 is part of World War II planes on exhibit at Pacific Aviation Museum on Ford Island.

“The real draw for us was to help bring this wonderful history alive,” Jones says. “Hawai‘i was a real focal point for World War II, and the same for Korea and Vietnam. It’s a privilege to help preserve that history.”

The planes Jones and his crew of volunteers have restored for display at the Pacific Aviation Museum include a Japanese A6M2 Zero, a B-25 bomber, an Aronca, a P-40, and a Stearman bi-plane that former President George H.W. Bush flew while training in Minnesota in 1942.

Jones is a stickler for getting the details right. The Zero that sits in the museum is a replica of the plane that crashed on Niihau in 1941, right down to the serial numbers on the side.

More than 150 volunteers have worked under Jones’ leadership, learning everything from which bolts go where to how to build wooden forms to shape new aluminum replacement parts. Many parts simply don’t exist anymore and materials like aluminum can be tricky. It’s not as forgiving as steel and a wooden form to make one piece can take a week to build. There might be 100,000 pieces to remake for one plane, according to Jones.

Restoring a plane to airworthiness demands the highest level of precision, both in the accuracy of remanufactured parts and the exact order of reassembly. The initial condition of the aircraft also affects the cost and time restoration requires. As Jones points out, “If you start with a plane that crashed into the ground at 400 miles an hour, there’s a lot of work to do.”

Jones’ biggest restoration job involved a B-17 Flying Fortress that had crashed in a tornado. It took Jones and his crew of six men seven years to complete the job. The cost can also be high. Purchase of a World War II era aircraft today might run $1.5 to $2 million; restoration work might end up in the $2-$3 million range and take four to five years. Cost is one reason many of these planes are owned by institutions rather than individuals.

KT and Syd Jones work on replica of the Stearman flown by President George H.W. Bush in World War II.

Jones is a Certified FAA Airframe and Powerplant mechanic. His knowledge is vast but he is not picky about the skill level of those volunteering to help him restore planes. “I’m happy to teach the skills to anyone who has the interest to learn,” he says. He has volunteers do as many different activities as possible, both to enlarge their skill set and to get them involved with the stories behind the planes and the people who used them.

Jones has racked up more than 1,000 hours flying warbird type aircraft. Vintage planes are difficult to come by and if you want to fly them a lot, he recommends buying your own. He and his wife own and fly a North American T-6G, a good, solid World War II plane that’s fast enough to be fun. These planes were built for maneuverability and durability in combat rather than comfort and ease of operation, Jones notes, adding, “The challenge is keeping it happy and not a smoking pile on the ground.”

He shares a doleful smile and adds, “It will slap you hard if you’re not paying attention.”

Jones’ work as a restorer, mechanic and pilot stays alive for him because the work makes history fresh. Working on and flying the planes he says, “is almost like a religious experience, like a religious mantra. Sitting in the cockpit you’re smelling the same smells, handling the same instruments right where you know hundreds of others were doing the same things. It’s like they’re flying with you as you look across the big cowl in front. The plane comes alive like a dinosaur waking up.”

Jones has found his life’s work. “It’s a real touchstone on history. That’s what makes it so cool.”

Tamara Moan is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Kailua.

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