An antique fair-weather flyer — General Aviation News

Mark Lancaster’s gorgeous 1938 Fairchild Model 24-J features wide-stance outrigger gear, a gleaming Curtiss-Reed prop, and a cowled radial Warner engine, which combine to lend a distinctive appearance to this Golden Age-era airplane.

Around 40 of these 24-Js were manufactured by the Fairchild Aircraft Corporation at Hagerstown, Maryland. Only nine are listed on the FAA Registry today.

Advertising in the 1930s touted the 24-J as being widely popular with private pilots because “…it is a delightful airplane to fly; amateurs and experts feel equally at home in it; it combines quick takeoff, rapid climb, excellent ceiling and marvelous landing control with a two-mile-per-minute cruising speed…”

Mark heartily agrees that the Fairchild is, quite simply, delightful.

The late-day sun softly colors the sky over NC19177.

NC19177 came to him in a rather unusual manner — he hadn’t been hunting for an antique, but recognized a good opportunity when it appeared.

Prior to Mark’s ownership, the previous owner set out to buy the Fairchild simply for its 145-hp Warner engine. The airplane had been in a barn near Oshkosh and hadn’t been flown for many years. They needed the engine for a Dart restoration project. When they went to Oshkosh to get the Fairchild, one of the project partners was surprised by the condition of the Fairchild.

Mark recounts he said, “’Why in the world do we want to take the engine out of this airplane? It’s a perfectly good airplane!’ So they hauled the Fairchild home, restored it, and continued looking for an engine for the Dart project, but I don’t think they ever finished the Dart.”

The 1938 Fairchild 24-J has split-type flaps and ball-bearing mounted controls.

The partners set about working on the Fairchild to get it flying again.

“The guys who purchased the aircraft in Wisconsin contacted the gentleman who originally ordered the airplane. They took all the factory original paint patches and cloth swatches that they could lay their hands on to him, and he picked out what he had ordered for the Fairchild,” recalls Mark. “The paint and interior had been changed many times since he bought it in 1938; this is as close as they could get it to ‘as-ordered’ condition. They also restored a lot of the instruments, and it has a King radio that’s underneath the right-hand side panel. When they finished the airplane, they took a picture of it and superimposed this gentleman on the picture, but he died right before they got a chance to give the picture to him.”

During a cross-country trip, trouble developed.

“The cowling mounts were just little pieces of thin aluminum and near Indianapolis the cowling came loose and came in contact with the prop. Of course you can imagine the noise,” says Mark. “It scared the guy, but he got it down with no problem, at an airfield south of Indianapolis. Then, to add insult to injury, when they were backing it into the hangar there, they dinged one of the wingtip bows.”

Mark Lancaster is happy he made the jump to buy and fly NC19177

A couple of years later, Mark bought the Fairchild.

“A repairable cowling and a Curtiss Reed prop came with the project, and I had Barry Taylor repair the wingtip damage. Normally I fly between 50 and 75 hours a year and that’s because I was working, but now I’m retired,” smiles Mark, “and that’s what brought on getting the Fairchild repaired and back flying.”

Mark started flying the Fairchild on relatively short trips, but started experiencing some unnerving inflight issues.

“We’ve chased some issues with it. It would stop running while you were flying it, and that scares people,” says Mark. “It did that two or three times and we chased and chased that problem. We had the carburetor off, and went through the ignition system — we were chasing everything possible and just never could figure out what it was. Finally, Classic Aviation at Pella, Iowa, took me under their wing and worked on it off and on through the winter. We had the carburetor rebuilt a second time, and found out that during the first overhaul on the carburetor they put in an old gasket. A section of that gasket had disintegrated and it was running so lean that it was dying.”

A valve issue also needed to be addressed, so Mark sent in the number one cylinder for a valve job.

“That cylinder gets dry up there if you don’t fly it for a while,” he says.

Of about 40 24-Js manufactured, only nine are listed on the FAA Registry today.

Fair Weather, Fun Flyer

With those and sundry other items resolved, Mark has been thoroughly enjoying his Fairchild flying time.

A longtime pilot, Mark soloed at 16 in a Cessna 150. Right after that, he attended A&P school and “bought an old beater Luscombe. I repaired that in school, and I flew the heck out of that until I finished college down in Kansas. My girlfriend, Teri (now his wife), was going to the same college, so we flew it back and forth and had a ball with it! Then it was life — wife and kids — and I kind of got out of flying.”

At 45, Mark had the realization that if he was ever going to get back to flying, he’d better start soon.

“So I bought a nice old 1956 straight-tail, polished 172. We flew that thing all over, chasing my daughter through colleges in Louisiana and Colorado. If you want to fly 100 mph, it’s a good little traveling airplane. Then I was looking for something different, and this Fairchild showed up. It was a big jump to buy and fly it — and I’m glad I took that big jump!”

NC19177 has a classy presence on the flight line.

NC19177 received the Fairchild Club ‘Best Closed’ award at the 2010 Antique Aircraft Association/Air Power Museum National Fly-in, and it still looks like an award winner.

Mark, who kept his tailwheel skills current by flying a friend’s airplane, declares that the Fairchild 24 isn’t difficult to fly, and elaborates that he “loves the aesthetics — just the looks of the aircraft. They fly like a dream! They’re just a nice, stable airplane. The controls are on ball bearings, it has a nice wide landing gear, and it’s very forgiving — I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in it. You just have to have your ducks in a row to land it — it’s a bit twitchy, even with the wide gear. They say you can’t land it on concrete, but this Fairchild lives on concrete where it is based at Ottumwa Regional Airport (KOTM) in Iowa. So grass is weird to me. I come out here to Antique Airfield and play with these guys, but my airplane is used to landing on concrete.”

NC19177 measures 23 feet, 9 inches from nose to tail, stands 7 feet, 3 inches tall, and has a wingspan of 36 feet, 4 inches. The empty weight is 1,415 pounds, and the payload is 702 pounds with a full 40 gallons of fuel onboard.

Cruising range is about 500 miles, and though it has an “advertised” cruise of around 118 mph, Mark says his 24-J will “cruise somewhere around 90-95 mph on a good day. If you get the tail up, and set up everything the way it’s supposed to be, you can maybe get 100 mph out of it. It’s not that fast. There’s not a lot of horsepower dragging it along — kind of the same as a 172, and I don’t mind!”

“Some of the nicest flights I can think of are rolling the windows down, taking the headsets off, and sticking a set of earplugs in,” he says. “It’s just fun and simple flying!”