Lassoing the Sun by Mark Woods

Author:Mark Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250105905
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

H.A.R.P.

Historic Aircraft Restoration Project

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, from nine to three, the hangar was open to the public. Several people had told me I needed to make sure to meet the volunteers, a bunch of old guys who came here to restore planes. But when I walked through the open door shortly after nine, I didn’t see any sign of anyone, volunteers or visitors. Unsure of whether I was in the right place, I walked back out.

“Leaving already?” said a man heading toward the door.

I introduced myself and explained what I was doing. Marty Malone introduced himself and led me inside, through some hallways, before reaching a door that led to the hangar. When he opened it, I did something I later saw other first-time visitors do.

I stood there for a second, eyes wide open. This hangar—the same one that from the outside looked like a long-forgotten eyesore—was full of beautiful planes, a mix of types and eras.

Muted light streamed in through the tall windows. Water dripped onto the floor, from leaks somewhere high above. When we started walking, Marty showing me around the place, the sounds—footsteps, voices, dripping water—echoed in the cavernous space.

While many of the volunteers were drawn to the planes because of their time in the military, Marty’s career had been in banking. He said he’d been fascinated by planes ever since he was a little boy, building model airplanes.

“And suddenly in my dotage, I get to play with the big ones,” he said with a grin.

The volunteers often had their own plane, one that they spent countless hours carefully restoring to “just short of airworthy.” Most of the aircraft, from Navy jets to police helicopters, had some sort of tie to Floyd Bennett Field. Some actually flew out of here.

Marty led me over to his plane, a Douglas A-4B Skyhawk attack jet.

“My late brother worked on this type of airplane when he was with the Marine Air Wing down here,” he said. “And I always had an affinity for it.”

We left the part of the hangar with the planes and headed to a break room, where some other volunteers were having coffee and chatting. Marty was seventy-one years old. And in this group, they only half joked, he was a youngster.

They were chatting about the day’s news, especially a story in one of the morning papers. It was about Al Blackman, one of the volunteers. At age eighty-six, he was still working as a mechanic for American Airlines. To celebrate his seventieth anniversary on the job, American took him flying on a fully restored 1937 DC-3. A few minutes after taking off from JFK, the plane rumbled over Floyd Bennett Field.

“He could have come to Hanguh B and hopped in one,” someone said.

They were joking. Sort of. They didn’t have a 1937 DC-3 in the hangar. But they did have a Douglas C-47 Skytrain. And they had a plane—one that, unlike the others, had never actually flown—that turned the clock back to July 1933. It

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