Any era is a good time to grow up around aviation. The lure, and lore, of flight are eternal.
I’m old enough to remember the days when airports, if they had any fences, had wide open gates. Visitors could walk among the tie-downs and strike up conversations with people turning wrenches or clanking a chain hoist to slide a propeller off an engine.
It was a time when warbirds weren’t known by that name, and their value lay in what useful function they could perform for their owner. That owner was likely the chief pilot and mechanic, sleeves rolled up and elbow-deep in oil and grease. Someone with a storehouse of practical knowledge who, more likely than not, was happy to talk with a kid who showed interest.
I’ve lost track of how many ramp conversations I had with that genial stereotype, but I knew him well (yes, it was purtnear always a him).
So it was as comfortable as a well-worn pair of boots to began chatting with the folks working on several B-17 firebombers at the Mesa, Arizona, airport on a brisk winter day in 1980.
That’s when someone said I needed to go meet Max Biegert, the man responsible for getting the B-17F registered N17W out of a city park in Arkansas and returning it to flight as a large sprayer and air tanker. Equipped with his phone number, I called Mr. Biegert, and true to the code of the easygoing airplane entrepreneur, he extended a friendly and casual invitation to drive up to his place in the Arizona desert.
I don’t know what I expected to find as I drove unfamiliar desert roads to Max Biegert’s home, but it wasn’t the Roman villa with a stunning overlook from a mountainside that ultimately greeted me. And then I was chatting with Max Biegert, who was that down-to-earth hands-on aviator I had known in so many iterations since my childhood.
I did not know it at the time, but Max and his wife Thelma had created a national childcare network that they sold five years earlier. And their agricultural aircraft business venture had grown well beyond the humble start-up with Stearmans, Cessna UC-78s, and that B-17F retrieved from a small town park in Arkansas.
As I savored the expansive desert vista, Max briefly excused himself to conclude discussions with a financial professional on precious metals transactions.
And then we sat down to talk B-17s and crop dusters. Out came the black-and-white snapshots from the late 1940s and early 1950s, some deckle-edged. A native of Shickley, Nebraska, Max and his brother John went into business providing aerial application services, initially in Nebraska. A surplus Stearman biplane carrying a 75-gallon fighter drop tank for pest control can be seen spraying a swath in one photo.
In another, Max smiles gamely beside a larger fabric-covered Cessna UC-78 carrying the Biegert name punctuated by numerous jagged holes ripped by midwest hail. Even the aluminum engine nacelles are rumpled.
Max’s game face and the attitude of quiet determination behind it would serve him well over the years as he wrestled a big B-17 out of a city park and out to the airport in Stuttgart, Arkansas, in sections to reassemble it for decades of service as a large-area sprayer and fire bomber.
Somewhere between the town’s acquisition of the B-17F as a war memorial and its disposition of it years later, apparently the fine print of the agreement with the federal government had been lost or forgotten. Before Max could get his applied-for civil registration painted on the B-17, he had to settle with the government for an additional $20,000 payment for clear title to the Fortress that had technically been on loan to Stuttgart, Arkansas.
Max and John Biegert outfitted their B-17 with extensive internal and external tanks, and secured contracts for wide area grasshopper spraying. In later years Max occasionally leased N17W to other organizations for spraying jobs, finally selling the converted bomber in the early 1960s.
Had he never retrieved it from Stuttgart, this scarce B-17F might have gone the way of some other war memorial aircraft that simply disappeared over the years.
Instead, N17W flew as a grasshopper and gypsy moth sprayer, a fire ant eradicator, and an air tanker battling wildfires. Occasional movie jobs punctuated the career of this B-17 before its last commercial owner, Globe Air, sold the bomber to Bob Richardson of Seattle in 1985. And then it was on to Seattle’s Museum of Flight, where N17W resides today in the city of its birth, and arguably the single most iconic symbol of Boeing’s presence in the Northwest.
I can’t say that anything other than business pragmatism and healthy optimism prompted Max Biegert to buy and fly N17W in the 1950s. But his bona fides as a believer in historical preservation came to light in the late 1980s when he resurrected the defunct branch line of the Santa Fe Railroad that was built to take tourists from Williams, Arizona, to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
A previous endeavor had tried and failed to resuscitate the line after Santa Fe stopped running trains on it in 1968. Max and Thelma Biegert had lent some money to the earlier effort, and they jumped in to save the operation even as track was being ripped up. It is said the Biegerts invested $15 million to get the railroad rolling.
First run of the reinvigorated Grand Canyon Railway was Sept. 17, 1989.
Some in Williams say the rebirth of the tourist railroad to the Grand Canyon saved the town of Williams from becoming just a bypassed milepost on the interstate.
Max and Thelma Biegert sold the railroad in 2006 to the Xanterra company, the current name for the Fred Harvey hospitality organization that had served trackside amenities for the Santa Fe Railroad dating back to the 1870s.
The railroad that Max Biegert saved from destruction thrives today, with everything from steam locomotives to diesels and strings of passenger cars including one with placards on each side naming it the Max Biegert parlor car.
In May 2021, Max and Thelma Biegert died within days of each other in Arizona. They were 94. The couple who met at a dance in Nebraska in 1950 survived and thrived together.
Their legacy lives on for the thousands of people who visit the Grand Canyon Railway, and in a sense, the Museum of Flight and its B-17F.
And the legacy lives on for me with my memories of that genial aviator who made time to chat about old ag planes in 1980.
I met Max and Thelma Biegert when I was only around 9 or 10 years old. My soon to be step father was close friends with both Max and Thelma and he too was in the aviation business and he like Max was a Midwesterner who grew up a short distance away from Max in Council Bluffs Iowa. In the early 1960’s my step father even purchased a small aircraft company that Max owned at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and renamed it Desert Aviation. And Like Max before him, he would salvage old former warbirds and restore and repurpose them. If I’m not mistaken, that B17F – N17W was for a time at Sky Harbor Airport and had a belly tank modification for fire fighting my step dad may have been a minority partner before Max sold it. My step dad had quite the collection of old war planes at the field that he either owned outright himself or was a partner. They included several P51Ds that he restored and resold. At least a few P47 Thunderbolts that came and went. Numerous F4U Corsair’s ( I recall 6 of them ) that were stored on the field for spare parts, but never flew again as far as I know. He had participated in the restoration of many aircraft including a PBY Catalina and a B25 and B26 that became corporate planes of the day. He also flew charters a number of times. Max was one of those rare people that seemed to be able to accomplish pretty much anything he got involved in. He built a bowling alley in an area called Sunny Slope and of course it was a big success too. I did some house sitting for him and Thelma while they were on a monthlong trip to Africa in the early 70’s. That was a very beautiful home up on Mummy Mountain that they spent a small fortune on to design and build themselves. After my mother passed away I lost contact with them, but I continued to follow their successes.
What a great example of how many unsung interesting stories there are in aviation.
Well done!
As usual, this author always produces great content. Reading his articles, is always a fun endeavor. This story, about Max and Thelma, is a fascinating glimpse into some of the everyday events, and the lives and activities, of the associated people, that have made the USA, the greatest nation on earth.
What a touching story on the drive and tenacity it takes to save “things” from the past (and the wrecking ball)!! We must always remember where we came from and “preservation” is one way of doing this. In the “throw away society” we now live, you must wonder how future generations will look at us and ponder why we did what we did.