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Buckle up
Thom Richard, flight instructor and owner of Warbird Adventures, helps writer Hastings Hensel strap into the front seat of a World War II-era T-6 Texan for his first flight lesson at the American Dream SkyRanch.
Photo by Travis Bell
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The pilot maker
The fun-to-fly T-6 was the U.S. military’s advanced fighter trainer during World War II. Today, it is known as “the pilot maker,” says Thom Richard of Warbird Adventures. “This is the aircraft you would fly as a fighter pilot before you transitioned to a single-seat fighter.”
Photo by Keith Phillips
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The adventure begins
Writer Hastings Hensel’s first flight in a T-6 begins with a smooth roll out and take off on the grass strip of the American Dream SkyRanch.
Photo by Keith Phillips
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The world turned upside down
During introductory flights designed to ignite a passion for aviation, guests take control of the T-6 Texan and even perform loops and rolls under the direction of the instructor in the back seat. “We’re not a ride operation. We’re a flight school,” says Thom Richard of Warbird Adventures. “We put people behind the controls, and they do the flying.” Just minutes after taking the stick for the first time, our writer completed this loop maneuver—and lived to tell the story.
Photo by Travis Bell
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Ready to fly
Writer Hastings Hensel in the front seat of a T-6 just moments before engine start-up.
Photo by Keith Phillips
At 5,500 feet above the ground, we can see for miles. We can see the farmlands and woods and small towns of at least four counties. We can see the 11,000-plus acres of Lake Greenwood spread out like a mere puddle. We can see birds flying between the clouds because we, too, are flying between the clouds—the fiercest bird of all, a yellow World War II-era T-6 Texan, 2½ tons of metal and whirring propeller blade.
But then the world, for all its vastness, goes very small.
“Are you ready,” I hear a voice reverberate through my headset, “to learn how to fly this thing?”
Suddenly: tunnel vision, near-vertigo. I see only the inside of the cockpit into which I’m strapped—a dashboard of knobs and dials whose readings might as well be in a foreign language.
Until now, I’ve been on cloud nine, along for the most mind-blowing flight of my life. But Aiken Electric Cooperative member Thom Richard—my flight instructor and the owner of the world’s largest T-6 flight-training school, Warbird Adventures—is now telling me from the rear seat to grab the control stick and put my feet on the rudder pedals.
I have two thoughts running through my head at 200 miles per hour. One is born out of fear. When I was a kid, my favorite book was Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, which begins with a pilot having a heart attack, forcing a 13-year-old boy to land a small plane in the Canadian wilderness. Ever since, I’ve imagined this life-or-death scenario. The other is born out of determination: my grandfather was a World War II bomber pilot who flew more than 100 missions in Europe. Surely, I’ve got something of the aviator’s instinct coursing through my flesh and blood.
Both thoughts reach the same conclusion: I have no choice but to learn how to fly this thing.
So, I take control of the airplane and let Richard talk me through it. With a forward thrust of the control stick, the nose dips; with a backward thrust, it pulls up. When I maneuver the stick to the right or left, the plane rolls in that direction. When I press the rudder pedals, the plane yaws to either side. It’s hard to believe how sensitive the controls are, yet also how intuitive.
But this isn’t one of those virtual reality simulations. I am truly flying a warbird.
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Meet your instructor
Thom Richard, an Aiken Electric Cooperative member, maxed out his credit cards to buy his first vintage T-6 Texan and launched the Warbird Adventures flight school in 1998. People come from around the world to his American Dream SkyRanch near Ninety Six to learn how to fly World War II aircraft. The school’s instructors can teach everything from a traditional private pilot’s license to aerobatics and formation flying.
Photo by Travis Bell
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Living the dream
While the T-6 serves as the primary training craft, there’s nothing Thom Richard loves more than flying his Curtiss-Wright P-40 Warhawk in air shows and during aerobatic displays. He considers it “the best airplane ever made.”
Photo by Travis Bell
Thom Richard is the archetype of an aviator—Top Gun-handsome, his features lean and angular, as if carved by the wind. He talks in a pilot’s cadence, clipped and clear and matter-of-fact. His story, too, is one of many air miles logged, and when you meet him, you trust he’s the guy you want to teach you to fly.
“I grew up in Sweden,” he says. “When I was 7 years old, I decided I wanted to go air racing for a living because I read an article about that specific subject and thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. So, everything I did from that point on was to move towards that goal.”
At 17, he immigrated to the U.S. with $2,500 in his pocket, a gift from his grandfather. In California, he became an aviation mechanic and a flight instructor. About those fledgling years, he says, “I was homeless. I lived in my car because I’d spent my money on flight lessons instead of room and board. It made complete sense to me.”
Eventually, he moved to Florida, answering a “help wanted” ad for T-6 flight instructors, and from there, he worked in various jobs in aviation. In 1998, he maxed out all of his credit cards to buy his first T-6 and fulfill his dream of starting Warbird Adventures, a business he moved from Florida to South Carolina a little over two years ago.
“Here’s why flight school and aviation on the whole are doing it wrong,” he explains. “The kid who’s interested in aviation shows up at the flight school. They get an introductory lesson in a Cessna 172, let’s say. They fly around a little bit and get to handle the controls. They get on the ground and go, ‘That wasn’t as exciting as I thought it was going to be. This is probably not for me.’”
Warbird Adventures, however, takes a wildly different approach.
“We introduce people to the fun end of aviation, which is warbirds, aerobatics, tail draggers, helicopters, seaplanes, all the great stuff you can do after you get your license. So, then the student realizes, ‘Wow, that is something I can do down the line. It’s totally worth the cost and time and drudgery of getting my license.’”
This is why people from all over the world come to the American Dream SkyRanch near Ninety Six, where Richard is building an aviation mecca with a team of “four full-timers, a bunch of part-timers, and a slew of volunteers.” Flying vintage World War II airplanes is something of a niche hobby, but in a world facing a shortage of pilots, their fun-first strategy has made them a recruitment organization for aviation that has trained thousands of pilots.
It is also why, just a few seconds after handling the controls for the first time, I hear Richard ask me through the headset, “Okay, now are you ready to do some aerobatics?”
By now, there is no way out of it. There is only through it—which, for aerobatics, means over and under and sideways and upside-down through it.
In a series of stick thrusts and pedal depressions—a choreography Richard talks me through—we corkscrew the plane in an aerial maneuver known as an aileron roll. There’s an airsickness bag tucked into the cockpit, but I thankfully don’t have to reach for it, even when the G-forces makes me feel like the weight of the world is atop me. Then we do a loop. Then, finally, a barrel roll.
Each time, Richard asks, “How was that?!”
But this is a rhetorical question, one to which he already knows the answer. “That,” I yell into the headset, nearly speechless, “was so [redacted] awesome!”
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Big runway, bigger plans
The American Dream SkyRanch is a registered airport with a 4,250-foot lighted grass runway that can accommodate most aircraft and host air shows, but it’s located outside of traditional air travel corridors, Thom Richard says. “We can do aerobatics right on top of the property all day long, which is fantastic for our purposes.”
Photo by Keith Phillips
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Chase plane
To get aerial images for the story, photographer Travis Bell flew in a T-6 chase plane with Warbird Adventures flight instructor Wes Atteberry.
Photo by Keith Phillips
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This is your pilot speaking
Wes Atteberry, a flight instructor at Warbird Adventures, checks on photographer Travis Bell in the chase plane. During training flights, students sit in the front seat of the T-6 and the instructors sit in the back. The spots were reversed for this flight so Bell could have a better field of vision.
Photo by Travis Bell
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Form up
Shooting from a second T-6 Chase plane allowed photographer Travis Bell to get images like this one, of writer Hastings Hensel learning to fly with instructor Thom Richard.
Photo by Travis Bell
As we descend back toward a landing, the 104 acres of the American Dream SkyRanch come into clearer focus. We can see the grass runway, the hangars, the other planes, the house he’s turned into a bed-and-breakfast, the fishpond, and the creek that runs through a grove of black walnut trees.
Richard, though, can see something else—the place he is building. He can see the spectator area for the airshows he is going to host. He can see the horse pasture, the shooting ranges, the wedding venue, the skydiving operation, the vendor and parking areas, the campgrounds (primitive, RV, and fly-in sites), the brewery or distillery that will make use of the natural springs, the party deck, the stage for live music, and the 5-kilometer trail for running and biking.
As we land, it becomes even clearer why, out of all the properties he scouted up and down the East Coast for six months, Richard landed here.
“We’re basically building a little Disney World of aviation,” he says. “We want to do non-aviation events at an aviation venue to get people introduced to what we do. Because Joe Public hardly ever gets any exposure to aviation. They don’t understand. It’s foreign to them; they think it’s for the rich and famous. And that’s not the case. Anybody can learn to fly. And that’s our purpose.”
The wheels touch the ground, and we taxi over toward the hangar. I unlatch and slide back the cockpit glass, my arms akimbo out of the airplane in the fighter pilot’s pose. When Richard whips the T-6—all 42 feet of its wingspan—into its place beside the other warplanes, he does it as easily as one might park a golf cart.
I take off my headset and helmet, and I grin with adrenaline. I think of my grandfather and realize I’ve never felt closer to such an important part of family and world history.
And even though Richard has done this countless times, he’s grinning, too. It’s clear that this never gets old.
“Sure, it’s a job just like any other job,” he says. “But if you can’t think of anything else you’d rather do, you’re probably in the right place. I mean, I get to fly World War II airplanes for a living. It’s ridiculous. How does that even happen?”
But this, too, is a rhetorical question. It happens through the stabilizing balance of two things—hard work and the dreams of a man with his head in the clouds.
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Get There
Warbird Adventures is located at the American Dream SkyRanch, 9250 Fruit Hill Road, Ninety Six, SC 29666. They offer T-6 flights, T-6 training, tailwheel private pilot training, introductory aerobatics, advanced aerobatics, spin training, and formation flying lessons. For more information or to book online, visit warbirdadventures.com.