Warbird Information Exchange

Millionaire Jet Set Has a Distinctly Military Turn of Mind

By Paul Dean
Los Angeles Times
Washington Post Service

 CHINO, Calif. — The T-38 Talon
flies at 950 mph, escorts space shut-
tle landings and trains fighter pilots.
The U.S. Air Force does not sell off
such first-string supersonic jets to
civilians. Even crashed Talons are
demilitarized, stripped, sliced,
torched and finally bulldozed into
total tangles before being' sold as
scrap.
 But that has not prevented civil-
ian pilot-businessman Chuck Thorn-
ton from obtaining a T-38 as his
personal supersonic transport. He
simply started at several scrap
yards and is working his way back
up. And Thornton, 40, president of
Thornton Corp., a Los Angeles in-
vestment firm, is building one Talon
from the pickings of six military
wrecks.

 DURING THE early 1950s and
the Korean War, American aces
were schooled aboard Lockheed T-
33s before graduating to the F-86
Sabre, the famed all-purpose cleans
-er of MiG Alley in Korea
 Dave Tallichet, head of Specialty
Restaurant Corp. of Long Beach, Ca-
lif., which formerly operated res-
taurants aboard the Queen Mary,
owns both combat jets.
 He recently switched from do-
mestics to imports.
 Tallichet is preparing to reassem
-ble, refurbish and fly a supersonic,
British-built Hawker Hunter bought
from the Swedish Air Force.
 Then there is the A-4 Skyhawk, a
700-mph veteran of many foreign
wars from the early days of Viet-
nam to the final hours of the Falk-
lands fighting. Retired Skyhawks of-
ten are found petrified in
permanent flight on pillars outside
VFW posts.
 That was where Bruce Goessling
of Chino, Calif., found his.

 HE HAS been rebuilding it for a
year, and the Skyhawk will fly
again as yet another of the growing
flock of jet warbirds in mufti.
 "They are," Goessling said of ci-
vilians who restore and fly military
jets, "the lunatic fringe of aviation."
If that is the case, then Goessling
is keeper of the asylum. He calls his
clinic, with a certain catchiness, Un-
limited Aircraft Limited, and it is in
a former Army Air Corps hangar at
Chino Municipal Airport.
 Here, Goessling, 52; his wife, Lin
-da; and eight mechanics tend inpa-
tients in various stages of repair,
disrepair, treatment and trans-
plantng. An F-86 Sabre owned by an
American Airlines captain is in five
major pieces and almost ready for
assembly. Outside is a lineup of re-
built T-33s in circus-bright paint
jobs. Over there, the camouflaged
fuselage of Tallichet's Hawker
Hunter sits in its cradle like a
beached seal. Inside, Thornton's T-
38 is an open shell trailing great
clumps and ropes of electrical wir-
ing.
 Each month, Goessling's outpa-
tients. millionaires such as Thorn-
ton and Tallichet, visit for the ther-
apy of touching their dismantled
airplanes and monitoring the nuts
and bolts of the restoration process.
They eventually will find total reha-
bilitation — that first liftoff from
Chino's runways on the precise, sen-
sitive stick of an ex-military fighter
that can nudge or exceed the speed
of sound while extracting a new
wildness from the blue yonder.

 PILOTS WILL pay $150,000 (the
average price of a one-owner T-33)
and much more for supersonic exo-
tics.
 And the bucks don't stop there.
An F-86, according to Goessling, will
eat $6,000 a year in maintenance.
Fuel consumption of 300 gallons per
hour is a gas-guzzing nightmare. So
for every hour of fun aloft, a pilot
must pay $528 for jet fuel.
 "So these remain specialty air-
planes for wealthy people," Goessl-
ing said. But precisely what kind of
people? "The kind of guy who
would go to a car race, watch a
Porsche 935 and go right out and
buy one for the street. That kind of
man has to have an F-86, the ulti-
mate jet fighter. He just wouldn't be
satisfied with a (World War II) P-
51."
 Ebby Lunk[e]n, a former Bendix
Trophy-winning race pilot living in
Cincinnati, parks his T-33 outs(i)de
Goessling's hangar. He is 70. Gary
Levitz owns an F-86 and a T-33.
That is Levitz as in Levitz furniture.
Author and former Air National
Guard p(i)lot Richard Bach finds the
freedom he gave Jonathan Living-
ston Seagull in his T-33.

 "FROM A banking man to a Kan-
sas farmer," Goessling continued.
"When they (pilots) get the bug to
own one, they can't stand it. And
they'll scratch up the money until
they do own one."
 As a director of Litton Industries
and son of the late Charles Thorn-
ton Sr., former chairman of the
board, Chuck Thornton does not
quite qualify as a financial
scratcher. Nor does he fit Goessl-
ing's profile of the madcap civilian
jet jockey.
 "With me it's not a blood-and-guts
thing at all," explained Thornton, a
former jet pilot with the Pennsylva-
nia Air National Guard. "I'm not a
particularly brave person and the
derring-do just isn't my motivation."
 Then why ownership of a Mach
1.3 (1.3 times the speed of sound)
jet trainer? "Because jets are more
reliable — this one can get you
there faster than any commercial
flight — and in addition, they're
incredible to fly ... effortless, si-
lent, vibration-free ... it's euphoric,
it's a wonderful, free, feeling to go
up and fly one of these things."
 Thornton acknowledges that the
high fuel consumption of any jet
warbird certainly is a down-to-earth
negative. "There is that premium to
pay," he admitted, "but you also get
a helluva lot more airplane for a
marginal increase in operational
costs."

 ON THE positive side of the same
picture, Thornton intends to use his
T-38 for business travel and will
lease it to companies searching for
a fast, high-flying test-bed for new
aviation systems — all of which,
explained Thornton, will add profit,
to say nothing of tax advantages, to
his private pleasure. That passion
began, he recalled, with several re-
alizations stemming from 20 years'
exper(i)ence as a pilot.
 He found little joy attached to
flying the fighters of World War II,
the P-40s and P-51s. The ride is too
rough, the thrill factor is too high.
Then there is the adverse ratio of
performance vs. cost and reliability.
 So Thornton turned to high-per-
formance jets available on the civil-
ian market. The T-33s, he decided,
"are slugs, not sexy." The F-86 is
"strictly one-place." And if flight
testing were to be his raison d'etre
for owning a jet, then only a two-
place T-38 had the ability to "climb
higher and faster than the F-86s, F-
100s and T-33s being used as test


platforms ... and be an ideal, per-
sonal jet."

 SIX MONTHS ago, Thornton
found his T-38 — or rather the out-
line of what was left of one — as
someone else's restoration project
abandoned in a barn in Sonoma,
Calif. The jet had been an Air Force
trainer that had landed short.
 Thornton bought the hulk, had it
trucked to Goessling at Chino Air-
port and the start of what would be
at least 12 months' work before
flight testing. One of the first moves
was the purchase of five demilita-
rized wrecks and the cannibalizing
of every panel, switch, connection,
cable and fitting that had escaped
the wreckers.

 "WHEN WE started, we were
5,000 part numbers short," said
Thornton. "The wrecks provided us
with about 4,000 parts, and now
we're down to 100."
 Thornton knows, precisely, why
he wants a jet. But why did Talli-
chet buy that T-33 and his F-86? Or
the two De Havilland Vampire jets
he has in outdoor storage, the
Hawker Hunter recently delivered
to Goessling, and the three SAAB
Lansens purchased in another deal
with the Swedish air force?
 "I ask myself the same thing,"
Tallichet chuckled. "But I do know
I'm buying them (jets) because I
want to fly 'ern and I will fly 'em.
For me — apart from the fact I'm
going to lease out the SAABS to
flight-test electronic gear — there's
the challenge of flying one of those
jets. I'm 60 now. I'd like to get
checked out (to fly jets) at that
age."

 THERE ALSO is the distinct in-
vestment potential attached to ac-
quiring and rebuilding jet fighters.
 "Take Chuck Thornton's T-38,"
suggested Goessling. "It's our front-
line trainer in the United States and
will be for the next 10 years. It's a
Mach 1.3 airplane, and for today it's
the ultimate in civilian-military
hardware.
 "So when it rolls out and flies, it
will immediately be worth twice as
much as had been put into it, be-
cause when it leaves here it will be
a brand new T-38, and you can't buy
brand new T-38s."