Living the dream

Crosswinds-Wilson Airport (SC37) is home for Jim and Eileen Wilson, owners of four antique aircraft and a country flying spread most people who love general aviation would consider the epitome of living the dream.

The 3,800- by 100-foot grass strip is nestled between tall pines on a 104-acre farm in the South Carolina Low Country about five miles from the shore of Lake Moultrie in Berkeley County near Charleston. Alongside the runway the Wilsons have a two-story home, plus a spacious hangar that houses their aircraft and a restoration workshop.

On the Saturday morning I flew in, Jim had parked his aircraft between the hangar and home. First in line not far from the front porch was a 1928 Travel Air (NC6479), then their 1936 YKS-6 Cabin Waco (NC16598), a 1930 Fairchild KR-21 (Kreider-Reisner) (NC362N), and finally Jim’s first aircraft, a 1943 clipped wing L-4H Cub (N2175Y).

All the aircraft are airworthy and examples of Jim’s skills as an aircraft restorer.

In the case of the Travel Air, for instance, he either found the needed pieces and parts or fabricated what was lacking.

“My father was a veterinarian, but he could build anything,” Jim said. “I picked up his ability. I have never been intimidated by anything on an aircraft. I take the time to learn all of the craft necessary to restore and take care of these aircraft.”

Jim’s primary lair at Crosswinds is a workshop built onto the hangar. There, machine tools and milling and metal-working devices of every type share space with airplane parts, pieces of engines, a Waco wing ready for a rebuild, and a 1909 seven-cylinder rotary Gnome engine awaiting an overhaul.

An obsession since 7

“I was born in 1949 and raised across the road from the Sussex, New Jersey airport,” Wilson said. “It was a small country airport and the only thought I’ve had since I was seven was airplanes. As soon as I got myself where I could afford flying lessons, I started in 1968. I got my license in 1969.”

He purchased the 1943 Cub while studying at the Newark School of Engineering and immediately began restoring it. And that is what he has been doing with aircraft the last 55 years — flying, restoring, repairing, fabricating parts, and turning ground-bound vintage aircraft into airworthy machines.

He said a Sussex airport mentor, Dick Lawson, “told me that any part on an airplane could be reproduced. He said if someone had made it, I should be able to make it also. I just had to get the skills needed to do the work.”

Doing every part of a restoration became Jim’s guiding principle early on when he bought his Cub for $1,046 from the New York Wing of the Civil Air Patrol. He stripped the aircraft to the frame and rebuilt it with guidance and advice from Lawson.

“After college my eyesight wasn’t good enough to qualify as an Air Force pilot,” he said. “So I became an Air Force maintenance officer responsible for C-5s, C-141s, and C-17s at Charleston Air Force Base.”

He spent four years on active duty, 1972-1976, and then joined the Air Force Reserve from which he retired in 1994. During those Air Force Reserve years his day job was directing the engineering department at a company in nearby Moncks Corner. However, his real passion remained repairing and restoring aircraft.

Jim met Eileen Paxson when she was a nursing student at Seton Hall University, where she graduated in 1971. She became a Navy nurse, first at the Naval Training Center Hospital in Great Lakes, Illinois, and then at the Charleston Naval Base hospital. The couple married in 1973 while both were stationed at Charleston.

She never became a pilot, but over the years has spent considerably more time in aircraft than Jim’s more than 3,700 logged hours. She joined the Air Force Reserve in 1980 and, as Jim explained, “did hundreds of trips and duty to all corners of Europe, Central America, Africa, and the Middle East.”

In 1988 Wilson found the piece of property that would become Crosswinds.

“It was halfway between Moncks Corner and Holly Hill in the upper northwest corner of Berkeley County,” he said. “The place was 450-feet wide and 4,000-feet long. I found a guy who built roads. He came out and stumped it and built a runway for me. At the time it was about 2,500 feet long. I bought two more tracts of land so I’ve got some perimeter. We started with 40 acres and now have 104 acres.”

“In 1990, we moved to our airfield where we spent one whole night before Eileen was deployed to Saudi Arabia prior to the First Gulf War with follow-on deployments during and after the war to Egypt, Germany, and then to Mogadishu, Somalia,” Jim recalled. “She retired from the reserve in 1996.”

In 2009 Jim retired from his work as engineering director at Gates Rubber Company after 35 years. Not long after he began a 15-year restoration project on the Travel Air.

“I came across the DNA of a Travel Air up in Indiana,” he said. “I decided to take the hard road and make it a speed wing Travel Air, the D-4D with a Wright J-6-7.”

The acquisition of the Travel Air project was preceded by closing the deal on a KR-21 manufactured at the factory in Hagerstown, Maryland. The firm had been acquired by the Fairchild Airplane Corporation and the plane eventually was designated a Fairchild KR-21. 

The Fairchild had once been an award-winning aircraft restored by Kimball Enterprises, but had a reputation for ground looping. Wilson said he solved that problem by removing the severe toe-in which probably accounted for the difficulty in landing.

“I found the Cabin Waco in the South Carolina upstate and got that in 2001,” he continued. “I only had it about two years and was at a meeting in Asheboro, N.C., when a thunderstorm with microburst tore it loose and it hit a pump house. I had to redo one wing and the whole back end.”

The repair of Waco and its required maintenance kept him away from the Travel Air for quite a while.

“I didn’t get back to work on it until I retired from Gates in 2009,” he said.  “Then I worked on it for 10 years to get it ready.”

Jim recounts that the restoration of a Stampe biplane almost cost him his life.

After a 10-year restoration he thought he had the world’s best-restored Stampe ready for display in the spring of 1992. Unfortunately, the aircraft caught fire from a static electricity spark while he was topping off his tank from a plastic fuel jug, and the aircraft and his wooden hangar were destroyed. He survived with serious burns, with Eileen nursing him back to health. Then he was on to the next restoration.

These days Wilson stays busy maintaining his aircraft and assisting fellow pilots and mechanics with assorted projects. He and Eileen are active in the Carolinas-Virginia Antique Airplane Foundation which stages fly-ins twice yearly at Camden, S.C. He also flies each of the four aircraft regularly.

“I flew the Travel Air and the Fairchild yesterday and the Fairchild this morning,” he said. “If we are going somewhere we usually take the Waco. If I want to see what the neighbors are doing, I fly the Cub. I keep them all moving.”

He added events at Triple Tree Aerodrome at Woodruff, S.C., are always on their flying schedule.

“Anytime Triple Tree opens the doors we go,” he said.

The couple are among the most loyal supporters of Triple Tree Foundation and Wilson said their estate, including the four aircraft, will go to the foundation.

Reviewing his nearly life-long love affair with aircraft, Jim points to the most important factor.

“I have been extremely lucky to have a supportive wife who enjoys both the flying and relationships that sprout from our involvement with the vintage airplane world,” he said.