EAA Sport Aviation - October 2010

St. Paul Downtown Airport/ Holman Field (STP) and wouldn’t fly again for more than three decades. Barely 10 years had elapsed between being the pride of Eastern Air Lines’ fleet to becoming one of aviation’s homeless. And then Carlos and Marc came along and snatched N836D out of a purgatory that would have soon seen it recycled into beer cans.

Welcome to barnstorming with the Historical Flight Foundation. For most people barnstorming conjures up memories of a bygone era when pilots with helmets and goggles would land their open-cockpit biplanes in a field and offer rides for a dollar. Carlos Gomez and Marc Wolff have a little different take on the subject. They think of airliners.

It all started in 2003 when Carlos was telling Marc, a friend since high school, about his experience as a crew member on some Constellations flying the air show circuit in Europe. “We started daydreaming about how cool it would be to have a restored passenger airliner and take it to air shows…essentially barnstorming the old airliners,” said Carlos.

Carlos has a freight operation using a DC-7B and knew of another that had been sitting in St. Paul, Minnesota, for years. But this DC-7B still had its original passenger configuration.

“So, while sitting there over a beer, Marc and I decided to do it: We were going to buy 836D, the very last DC-7B known to still have a passenger interior worldwide, and do our version of barnstorming with it,” said Carlos. “The only hitch was that it had been sitting there for 32 years.”

FROM PRIDE TO PURGATORY

When N836D joined Eastern Air Lines’ highly touted Golden Falcon Fleet of 50 DC-7s in January 1958, it was the fastest airliner in the world with a top speed of more than 350 knots. The last of the Douglas piston airliners featured four 18-cylinder Wright R-3350s, the same engine that powered the B- 29. But the DC- 7’s reign was short-lived. By the end of the year, the Boeing 707 was introduced, and with it the jet age began.

Five years after entering service, N836D found itself out on the street. It was sold and resold between travel clubs before finally becoming the prized possession of a retired Eastern Air Lines pilot, Joe Koucor, who intended to form yet another travel club. That never happened, and after a few flights with his family on board, N836D was parked at

FLYING FAMILIES

Although Marc, a business consultant, doesn’t work in aviation, he has a deep appreciation for the old prop-liners. His father was a machinist for Pan American and Eastern Air Lines, and his mother was a Pan Am flight attendant in the late 1950s. Carlos, who has called Miami home for nearly all of his 46

years, also comes from an aviation family: He is one of seven kids, and all were in aviation at one time. Four of his brothers are flying with cargo operators, another studied avionics, and his sister worked in the office of an aircraft maintenance company. They all grew up as mechanics working for their father, Martin, who still works with Carlos.

“First, I should tell you that I’m not
a pilot.” Slight pause. “Never wanted to
be,” Carlos said.

He spent summers in college helping mechanics at Trans Air Link work on DC- 6 and DC- 7 freighters. When he graduated from college, he bought a DC- 6, which he planned to fix up and sell. Instead he leased it to a Dominican cargo operator who needed a plane, and then he did the same thing with a couple of DC-7s. By the early 1990s, the cargo operator was out of business, and Carlos sold the aircraft and started his own freight operation, Florida Air Transport. When his source for leasing aircraft changed hands, he bought a DC-7B in 1998. Today he operates two DC-4s and a DC- 6 in addition to that DC-7B.