Air Time
FRANKLIN TWP — John “Jack” Chiprean Jr. is 85 years old. He's spent 31 of them painstakingly restoring a 76-year-old airplane, pursuing rare parts and making others from scratch.
Finally in 2016, the World War II-era Stinson 10A Voyager took to the skies once again piloted by Chiprean.
“I found it at an airfield in Ohio. It was advertised for sale,” said Chiprean, a member of the Experimental Aircraft Association for 34 years and a pilot even longer at 56 years.
“My brother and I went there and checked it out. I was looking for a project, and it became a huge project,” he said.
He began working on rebuilding the vintage aircraft — which was little more than a skeletal fuselage and engine — first in his garage and later on in a hangar on the property of his daughter and son-in-law, Cathy and Jan McDonald.
“It took 31 years to put it together,” Chiprean said. “I work slow, but I work meticulously. Every bit of that restoration I did myself.”
“That slowed the work. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) wants work signed off by mechanics, and I had to have mechanics look over my work.”
“The fuselage was made up of steel tubes and fabric covered,” he said. “Apparently the last person that owned it had stripped the fabric to redo it and never got around to it.
“All the steel tubes had to be sanded down and epoxy primed to make sure there was no rust anywhere,” said Chiprean.
“I had to make some parts, but there were still some parts available,” he said.
“The hardest thing to find were brake parts. They have balloon brakes and there are no more parts for them,” he said.
He also had to rebuild the Voyager's wooden tail section by hand after the original proved too rotten to salvage.
The engine, a 90-horsepower Franklin aircraft engine proved to be a different story.“It was inspected and in great condition. It was original equipment but I think it had been overhauled. It only had about 280 hours of flight time on it,” he said.The body of the aircraft which had been covered with Irish linen was refurbished with a modern fabric, ceconite, that should last four times as long.When finished, Chiprean said, the Voyager would be able to fly at a top speed of 95 mph. “It's a big plane with a small engine,” he said.It only needs about 1,200 feet runway for takeoff.It can stay in the air for five hours before its fuel runs out and can climb as high as 10,000 feet.It was a long restoration but Chiprean has had an even longer fascination for flying.“I must have been 7 or 8 years old, but I can remember planes coming down to hook bags of mail on the site where they built Butler High,” he said.The Voyager took to the air again piloted by Chiprean in 2016.“It's got two seats and had what they called a jump seat in the back that I did not install,” he said. “And it has an extra fuel tank.”Chiprean believes that extra fuel tank dates back to World War II.
His research turned up the fact his airplane was pressed into military service as soon as it rolled off the assembly line in 1942.“It came right out of the factory and went into the Civil Air Patrol,” Chiprean said.“It served in the Civil Air Patrol Coastal Patrol Base 8 in Charleston, S.C.,” he said, where it was used to look for German submarines in the waters of the southeast coast of the United States.“It carried a pilot and a spotter,” Chiprean said. “The Germans hated them. These little planes would find them (U-boats) and one of them even sunk one.”The Stinson Aircraft Company was based in Dayton, Ohio, said Ken Miles with the Collings Foundation. Based in Stowe, Mass., the foundation is responsible for the “Wings of Freedom Tour” of World War II aircraft that visited the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport last month.Miles said, “Stinson was a civilian aircraft company. They were designed and built in the 1930s. But during the war the government pushed everything into service that flew.”
“They had observation aircraft, like the L-1 Vigilant,” said Miles. “The German U-boats were attacking shipping up and down the East Coast as far south as New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. Many coastal cities were under blackout orders.”Following its stint on coastal patrol, Chiprean found out his airplane was sent to Civil Air Patrol Tow Target Unit 15 in San Jose, Calif.Civil Air Patrol planes would tow targets for air-to-air and ground-to-air gunnery practice by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft batteries.When the war was over, Chiprean said, the Voyager went back to Charleston, S.C., where the civilian owner, an E.V. Hill of Charleston, “got his brand-new airplane back after three years.”These days Chiprean says he takes the Voyager aloft for short flights to Zelienople, Grove City and Pittsburgh.“While it can climb to 10,000 feet, I stay at about 2,000 feet,” he said. “In aircraft there are instrument flight rules, IFR. For me, IFR means 'I follow roads.'”Chiprean said he uses ground landmarks to plot his flight path because his plane lacks modern instrumentation or even a radio, unless he brings along a hand-held set.
Miles said Stinson didn't survive as an independent company long after the end of the war. It was sold to the Piper Aircraft Corporation, in 1950, he said.Piper tweaked an original Stinson design (the “Twin Stinson”) into the successful Piper Apache, the world's first general aviation all-metal twin-engined modern aircraft, according to Miles.But one Stinson still takes to the skies over Butler County from a grass airstrip outside Prospect.“I'm not much of a flyer today. I've had it out six times this summer,” said Chiprean, adding a friend of his who pilots a jet for FedEx takes the Voyager up on occasion.“He has fun when he's flying this little puddle jumper of mine,” he said.He added his affinity for flying missed his four children and six of his grandchildren, but the seventh, Capt. Joseph Boben, attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and now pilots a B2 Stealth bomber.
