How Zach Briggs revitalises scrap aircraft

But when the Caribous retired a few years later, Briggs found himself posted to the more modern KC-30A, an enormous refueller based on the Airbus A330. Unlike the older aircraft, it had a central computer that did the hard graft for him, spitting out a piece of paper with a fault code when it touched down. The technician just punched the numbers into a laptop and dispatched the part to a contractor.

“I was just switching boxes. It was mundane, and I wasn’t using my skills. Just that sense of reward and job satisfaction was fading.”

Fast forward to the present day, and Briggs’s passion has been reignited by leaving the RAAF and reacquainting himself with those traditional skills. He now helms Relic Design & Craft, a “dream project” that sees him turn scrap aircraft parts into hand-crafted pieces of furniture. So far, he’s transformed a Boeing 727 into a wine rack, an emergency oxygen bottle into a desk lamp and, of course, a Caribou landing gear into a table. And that’s not including all manner of whatnots he sells to enthusiasts, from seat belt bottle openers to scrap metal folders and Aermacchi key rings.

Recently, he coos, he finished a conference table for 33 Squadron built from a DC 3 elevator. “It was four metres long, the legs were made of wingtips, and it had a big glass top. It took months, but it came out well. These are the kind of things I like to make because there’s a lot of history. You can read about where it’s been and what it’s done.”

Today, Briggs forgoes the diktat of productivity and efficiency to be guided by Andy Warhol’s mantra, who once said, “Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it”. The word value, he believes, can mean different things to different people, but he sees it in what he makes. If you’re repurposing something that was discarded, you’re giving it a new life, a new purpose.

“And if it has a historical value or stories behind it, then the more reason not to throw it out.”

In many ways, Briggs was never really destined for a career in the Air Force. Born in New Zealand, he moved to Australia as a small child and lived in the kind of small coastal town where creativity wasn’t the done thing. Nonetheless, he signed up with the RAAF and spent 12 years travelling around the world, including stints working on Blackhawks and being deployed to East Timor. “I’ve always had a creative side, but that’s very much suppressed in the military. Everything’s rules and regulations. Regimental is the word.”

Frustrated, he signed up to study industrial design at Griffith University. And it’s during this period he would often spot the relics of old aircraft rusting away on the ground outside Amberley’s aviation museum. One day, as he drove past, he spied an excavator chopping up some planes and decided to pull in and have a word. Why not let me turn them into functional pieces, he asked? Incredibly, the individual agreed and, that day, handed over a wing from an Aermacchi that Briggs was able to transform into a conference table.

“I did it in my backyard shed,” he says. “But I enjoyed it so much I wanted to keep going. I’d brought my two worlds together: the creative side I’d learned in my degree with my background in aviation as a technician.”

Before long, he’d taken his long service leave from the Air Force and rented a workshop in Brisbane, where he began making things from any bits of aircraft he could find. He launched a website, set up a social media page and uploaded his work. “It took a long time to grow and sell things,” he says. “It was quite difficult because I’m not a business person. I just want to be creative.”

As the project took off, he soon became a dab hand at hunting down the raw materials he needed. “Sometimes it’s easy; sometimes it’s hard. For example, a museum might purchase a plane they want to put on a static display, but they also get a shipping container full of spare instruments, seats and wings. Most of the time, they don’t have room for it, and if they can’t sell it off, they scrap it. I started to offer to take it away for free.” Or, to put it more simply, “It’s a lot of wheeling and dealing.”

Despite the pandemic, Briggs has grown the business and now has a second employee, another veteran, to help out. In fact, next week, his work will be exhibited at Empire Revival, an antique emporium in Brisbane. It will give him a chance to both show off his latest creations and act as a shopfront for new customers. “I’m working towards getting my own property to expand a little and store more aircraft parts. And then I won’t have to worry about the ever-increasing rent that just keeps going up.”

But right now, he has more pressing matters to attend to. He’s received one of his biggest bespoke commissions of the year to turn the wing from a RAAF Vampire into a bar for a client. He found the parts after a museum advertised them on Gumtree. They had eight lying in a paddock, unloved, with nowhere to put them.

“It all just came together,” he says.

Zach Briggs has created the Excellence trophy for this year’s Australian Aviation Awards. To find out more, visit relicdesignco.com