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George Yezman: Staggerwings and othe

"Fingerwork," he called it. George Yezman pointed to a glistening, partially assembled Staggerwing that served as the focal point of a cavern-like hangar. The airplane was the most complete of the four in the midst of a delicate restoration process. 
    
"It's tough to keep mechanics, these airplanes are so demanding." Yet Yezman's business - the intricate restoration of classics - thrives, supplemented by more mundane jobs repairing contemporary airplanes. For 10 years now, Yezman's Eastern Aircraft Company has tackled restorations; 16 have been completed over the decade - several Fairchilds, a Stinson Reliant, Waco UPF-7, Great Lakes, Ryan STA and the Staggerwings, the Beech airplane that made Yezman's reputation. Six of the 38 that flew to the last annual Staggerwing meeting were Yezman's handiwork.

He now works with his wife, Christine, and a crew of three A&P mechanics, Harold Washburn, Bill Goodson and Collin Green. Christine, whom Yezman met in France during an Air Force tour, was a dress designer for Christian Dior. Her work place now is a small room in the back of the Eastern Aircraft bay at Detroit City Airport's old terminal - itself an Art Deco era classic. She does the airplanes' interiors, cutting, tufting, and seaming French leather into lush seats and sidewalls that compliment the detail work in the rest of the airplane.

The yellow Staggerwing in Yezman's shop arrived for its rebuild in 1972. Its owner, a doctor, funds the job in bits and pieces. "At the Beech factory, it took 90 people three months to build a Staggerwing," said Yezman as he explained restoration work. A job will usually start with a wreck or an airplane found in shambles in a barn. Then Yezman and company tear into it and start all over again. Yezman has built jigs for the Staggerwing and keeps a copy of the original Staggerwing shop manual close at hand. He starts with the airplane's steel-truss frame, inspecting for cracks, replacing, rewelding and then refinishing. From there, he builds new wooden fuselage rings and stringers, new spars and ribs in the wings - whatever may be required. New mechanical fittings, gears, chains and cables are added. Gear and flap motors and the Pratt & Whitney powerplant are rebuilt. The airplane is covered in new linen. It's all smothered with dope and paint. 

Regulations prohibit a restorer from creating an all-new airplane. Technically, the 

MIRACLE WORKERS

JACK JIRUSKA: WACOS/ text by Richard L. Collins;

[[image]] I FIRST flew with Jack Jiruska in Piper's prototype Seneca I. Jiruska, manager of development engineering at the Vero Beach plant, was in charge of the airplane. We later flew in a Cherokee Six with a Continental Tiara engine on the front. All the while, I could sense stirrings of something different. So it was no surprise when he wrote a while later and said he had switched from Piper to the Waco business. He bought three of the old biplanes before leaving Piper, restored them, and moved from the drawing board to tobacco spraying.

Jiruska's first Wacos were straight-wing models, in which the wings had constant chord from the root to where the tip started banding around He next became involved with the Waco Taperwing (designated 10-T and later ATO), the legendary, classic version of the biplane. With a nearly symmetrical airfoil and wings that tapered gently from the root outward, the Taperwing had been the star of the late 1920s. It won air races and flew as well inverted as it did right side up. As a byproduct of that, it became the first commercial airplane to complete an outside loop. This was the real classic. If Juriska's Advance Aircraft Company was to live up to its name - the same as the one used by the company manufacturing Wacos back in the good old days - it had to restore the Taperwing.

The time was 1975; enter Walter Hill, flying a Ryan STA and still on line as an L-1011 captain. Hill had just purchased the STA, which he considered the finest classic monoplane, and he wanted a Waco Taperwing, which he considered the finest classic biplane. Jiruska decided that anyone flying an old Ryan couldn't be all bad, and in July 1975 they struck a deal: Jiruska would restore a Taperwing for Hill. A handwritten contract was scribbled, for a price that still brings a misty look to Jiruska's eyes.

There are no stores selling Waco parts, and most of the available carcasses are in battered pieces, so Jiruska had to be able to build any piece of the airplane. In order to do this, he accumulated a complete set of drawings. Now there is nothing he cannot build: fuselage cage, complete new wings, cowlings, instrument panels - the Advance Aircraft Company of 1980 does it all just the way the one 50 years ago did it. Of course, a whole airplane can't be built from scratch, even though that is easily within