Tom Reilly's Warbird Museum to Hold Last Classes

By ANN Senior Editor Tim Kern

It's the chance of a lifetime, an opportunity to learn how to do something really useful, while working on some of the rarest flying machines still extant.

In fact, it is because institutions like Tom Reilly's Flying Tiger Warbird Museum exist, that we peasants are able to see so many 60-year-old flying machines, flying. On the other hand, the handful of such brilliant restorations cannot stem the tide of history -- crashes and corrosion conspire to curtail the collectors' aspirations.

That's why it is so important, not just for our own edification, but for that of generations, to preserve and rebuild as many of the geriatric machines as we can; and that's why it is so important to pass on those skills.

You can learn to restore WWII warbirds at the Warbird Museum. Under the skilled hands and eyes of the best in the business, you'll learn how to select and buck rivets, how to deburr sheet metal, how to form those impossible shapes, how to plumb and wire technology back into museum projects. These machines will fly for decades, delighting and educating our grandchildren, who will ask why the airplanes had propellers, or tailwheels -- or why they had men inside, to fly them. The machines will demonstrate that there still are people with the skills to manage such machines, machines designed just thirty or so years after the Wrights showed that flying was possible at all.

If you don't do it this time, you may never get another chance.

We all have things to do, appointments to keep -- but, like missing Halley's Comet, there are some things you can't reschedule. If you ever wanted to learn how to build an airplane; if you ever wanted to actually contribute to the restoration of a flying piece of history; if you ever wanted to show your kids that, "I helped build that," as you go through a museum or as they wonder at an airshow -- this is your chance.

Next week, Tom Reilly's Flying Tigers Warbird Museum, in Kissimmee (FL), just outside Orlando, will start its last class on warbird restoration. "It might be the last one altogether," KT Budde-Jones told me; "It will certainly be years before we'd ever do it again. There's just too many things that are coming up -- the B-17's nearing completion (pictured), the P-40s, they're demanding a lot of time -- and there's more projects coming in, soon."

So, if you've ever wanted to not just help preserve history, but to build it, set yourself up for your vacation, or even -- hey, what would you do, if you knew this might be the last chance in your lifetime to do this? -- call the Museum and sign up. I'm told the class is "virtually full," but... it might be worth whatever it takes. 407-933-1942. November 10-14 ($995, and it includes a flight in the B-25); and a free fabric class (for former students) November 15-19.

FMI: www.warbirdmuseum.com