Pain of passion

Imagine, then, managing a stable of 40 aircraft, 490 members, three hangars, sponsors, the multitude of corporate and aviation regulators, government relations and media, all while trying to preserve the spirit and passion that attracted you in the first place, let alone keeping your pilot’s licence!

This is the job of Bob De La Hunty and his team at the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS).

When he signed up to becoming president of HARS in 1990, De La Hunty had the ambition of preserving a handful of aircraft that were pivotal to the development of aviation in Australia.

Now it’s serious business. Australian Aviation visited HARS at its still-under-development museum and hangar facilities at Illawarra Airport south of Sydney to see how De La Hunty’s vision has developed from preserving a clutch of aircraft to what is now one of Australia’s leading aircraft preservation organisations.

Passion

The first thing that becomes apparent is the frenetic activity in the hangars. Not just the painstaking craftsmanship being applied to restore the wooden frame of the Southern Cross, but the sheer number of volunteers working in every corner of each of the three hangars.

A recent addition to the fleet, the DC4, receives attention lovingly to every rivet, skin wrinkle and piston as if it was the personal pride and joy of the volunteers who work on it. Others tend the Connie as the flagship of the fleet with a pride that once typified the white-overalled engineers of an era when Constellations plied the three-day course to London.

Yet more clamber over one of the two spotless Caribous squeezed into the hangars changing a propeller with the same diligence they would have changed the blade of an RB211. Somewhere buried in the bowels of a room secreted away from view, an engineer is rebuilding frame-by-frame a P47 Thunderbolt from wreckage discovered in the Papua New Guinea rainforest and shipped to HARS in the hope one day it will take to the skies again.

Many of the 490 members specialise in one aircraft or another, or work behind the scenes in administrative roles, tend the growing number of visitors or clean the ever-expanding floors. That’s not by design, but by preference.

“Individual members are passionate about specific aircraft,” De La Hunty said.

The expertise is as diverse as the ages of the volunteers themselves, but for each it is an opportunity to learn. For the old masters it’s a chance to teach Qantas 737 pilots about the intricacies of the DC4’s construction. For those who are current line maintenance engineers with regional airlines, they can bring new skills and technology to the hangar, exploring new ideas to bring aircraft built before they were born back to life again.

Yet at a time when the aviation industry in Australia is crying out for skilled workers and apprentices, HARS is experiencing no such difficulty. In fact, management of the workforce available is proving to be a challenge.

“There are young people who are passionate about being able to play around with old aeroplanes. In fact, with airlines down-sizing, we’ve been benefitting,” explained De La Hunty. “It’s interesting to see that many of the retired engineers working here recruited some of the people who are now leaving the airlines to join us. We don’t see any shortages coming.”

Age profiles at HARS are changing as a result of the influx of younger volunteers. Not so long ago average ages were typically in the 60s, but now De La Hunty sees that dropping towards the 50s.

It’s apparent there is as much skill being transferred up the line and down the line, creating a sustainable knowledge transfer that’s every bit as palpable as the passion that drives it.

Away from the hangar floors and scaffolding, volunteers also run the museum and growing retail business. The facility currently receives around 17,000 visitors a year, although HARS would like to see that increase to 40,000 for the important revenue benefit it brings.

One of De La Hunty’s immediate ambitions is to build up the number of tour guides. This would not only fulfil the ambitions of HARS to share the significant heritage collection it has, but on a more practical side it will keep engineers productive on the aircraft.

Order and rhythm

For all the passion of the HARS members whether they are tour guides, front desk staff, kitchen hands or engineers, it’s vital that engineering and maintenance of the HARS fleet is executed with precision.

That job falls to Malcolm Hallowes, a former senior Qantas engineer, who applies an order and discipline as rigorous as it would be on the floor of an airline workshop.

One of the greatest challenges he faces is the intrinsic nature of the volunteer workforce.

“We have some people who come once a year, others once a month, but plenty every weekend or so,” Hallowes explained, adding that the biggest problem is knowing just when people might turn up.

“We would prefer to know in advance, of course, so we can allocate jobs in a properly co-ordinated way,” Hallowes said, adding with a wry smile: “But we’re just pleased that they turn up.”

On busy days there can be up to 150 volunteers on the floor. Sometimes more, particularly when aircraft are being prepared for flight ahead of attendance at one of the many air displays HARS aircraft participate in each year. Asked whether HARS has enough volunteer members, De La Hunty said: “We’re getting to a stage where out manpower resources are quite significant.”

The DC4 alone will consume more than 20,000 hours of labour. In that time, the aircraft, which participated in the Berlin air lift and was later used to run drugs between South America and the US (but on its last mission not making it all the way thanks to law enforcement agencies), will essentially become a ‘zero time’ aircraft. Its four Pratt & Whitney R2000 engines will have been fully serviced, corrosion in the airframe, skin panels and wings will have been remedied and the instrumentation, electrics and pneumatics either replaced or overhauled.

The same thoroughness is applied to all the aircraft, whether new to the collection or stalwarts like the Neptunes and Connie.

It is in this thoroughness that an interesting philosophy emerges. As De La Hunty describes, HARS is not an airline and has no rush to launch aircraft.

“We’re not in a hurry to fly anything. This isn’t like a commercial operation. We can afford to take out time to do things right.” It is this approach, using the original maintenance manuals for each aircraft, that keeps CASA and the Australian Warbirds Association, the latter of which plays a safety co-ordination role on behalf of CASA, satisfied that HARS aircraft are airworthy.

Pig sty

Yet just when order and rhythm are maintained in the hangars, more aircraft are arriving.

In February HARS takes delivery of an F111 – A8-109, an ex-USAF F111A that saw action in Vietnam – on loan from the department of defence. The preparation for this aircraft has been what was described as “a huge exercise in complying with defence requirements”. De la Hunty produced the voluminous manual that contains the risk assessments, plans and procedures demanded by defence before it finally releases the aircraft in pristine condition to the six institutions ear-marked to display the aircraft.

It’s been worth it, though. “The department ought to be congratulated on its vision for preserving such an important aircraft,” De La Hunty said.

The F111 will take pride of place in Number 1 hangar alongside the Connie, Hunter and Neptune, though the Pig’s size will make a sty of the orderly, but tight arrangement of aircraft the volunteers rightly pride themselves on achieving.

Then in roughly two years they will need to make room for the Convair 340 currently under restoration in Arizona.

“We’re progressively working on the Convair and in the next couple of years we’ll have it back here. It will add to the 1950s collection of aircraft where we already have the C47, Piaggio, Drover, the DC4 and Connie, all of which are representative of aviation in Australia at that time,” De La Hunty said.
The Convair’s preparation is reminiscent of that of the Constellation, a project that took six years to complete and a 6,000 mile trans-oceanic journey before it joined the other HARS aircraft.

While De La Hunty and his team have no immediate plans for more aircraft, he said: “Anyone who walks in with a viable project backed with funds, is prepared to run with it and is acceptable to our Chief Engineer is welcome. That’s been the pattern all along, and 40 aircraft later, HARS is a major going concern”.

It is that expanding scope, together with growing membership, a museum that operates as a commercial entity and regulatory demands enforced by numerous statutory authorities that is seeing corporate governance demands increasing proportionate to the scale of HARS’s operation.

“As we expand we must continue to apply strong measures and discipline to managing and governing HARS,” De La Hunty explained.

“If we don’t we are risking the very things that our members have built up, and that is one of Australia’s most important aircraft preservation facilities. And, of course, with it would go the passion and enthusiasm of our sponsors to keep HARS going,” he added.

The matter is of critical importance and gets to the core of not only HARS’ reason for existence, but the fragility the organisation has as one run by, supported by and made possible by a purely volunteer workforce. In its own right HARS has very limited capital and relies exclusively on grants and the ongoing goodwill of sponsors and members. In age when philanthropy is a precious commodity, the ability to demonstrate sound and stable management will help secure the inflow of funds.

For all of his 30-plus years with HARS, De La Hunty has remained committed to that cause. It would be hard to imagine what direction the organisation would go without that trademark perseverance. Yet De La Hunty’s doggedness is reflected in each of the 490 members, remembering none of them is forced to be there.

It’s about the passion, after all.