Click on Picture to enlarge

Click on Picture to enlarge

Roger Freeman showcases his antique airplanes like this original S4C Thomas Morse biplane, which was built in 1917, at airshows. Freeman has built two World War I-era Fokker fighters that now hang in the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.

The Farman IV Boxkite, a flying machine from the dawn of flight, looked ungainly in the morning light - all wood, wire and shellacked fabric. Owner Roger Freeman sat in the pilot's chair, hand on the throttle. Five feet behind him, a fixed-pitch, wooden prop ticked away.

He couldn't help but feel nervous as he gunned the engine and the Farman's 1,200 pounds began rolling across a grass field. In shape, it resembled the Wright Brothers' flying crate, a biwing tail-dragger with a forward elevator and a 42.5-foot wing span, perched on heavy bicycle wheels.

Freeman knew it would fly. Ground tests had proven that. But his 10,000 flying hours also told him the Farman was the crudest form of airplane, tricky and unpredictable. Knowing this, he still reproduced the 1909 original design faithfully, complete with aerodynamic flaws.

"I finally got enough nerve for the first trip around the field," he said. The Farman leapt into the air - and stayed up, straining for altitude.

Freeman builds faithful copies of antique aircraft for Air Force museums and sometimes for himself. He incorporates original parts where he can find them. More often, the parts are manufactured in his hangar, from the clutter that lines the walls.

"Most of the others [replica makers] are building look-alikes so they will fly better," he explained. "We specialize in going back to the original, or as close as possible. That's why most of our customers are museums."

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Freeman flies a Farman IV Boxkite he built that will be delivered to the Hong Kong historical society to commemorate the first flight from Hong Kong in 1911.

After logging six hours in the Farman, including an eight-mile flight to an airshow last year at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, Freeman was ready in September to deliver the plane to the Hong Kong Historical Association to commemorate the first flight from Hong Kong in 1911.

Freeman also has built two World War I-era Fokker fighters that now hang in the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. Additionally, he and three employees built replicas of 1917 Army ambulances for the Air Force Museum, the Brooks AFB, Texas, Medical Center and the Army Medical Museum.

Freeman's fledgling company, Vintage Aviation Services, Inc., is stuffed into a hangar at a private airport in Zuehl, Texas, a German-immigrant farming community about 20 miles east of San Antonio. On the assembly line behind the Farman is a 1909 Bleriot XI, a French-designed monoplane once considered advanced for its time.

"You can walk up to the Bleriot and name a half-dozen defects: poor airflow, wing warping and no ailerons," Freeman said. "No brakes either," he added with a wry smile.

"These things are from the beginning of flight. They [inventors] didn't understand a lot of things. They didn't know what they were getting into. We know a lot more now about what their problems were."

Taking hold of the stick of an early flying crate might be compared to taking the reins of a green bronc. It might fly peaceably, and then again it might not.

"We don't just climb in it and take off," Freeman said. "We see how the ground handling goes. We run it down the runway to see if we can get it to pop off the ground, and then settle it down.

"Once you know you can stop without killing yourself, then you go around the field. That's the critical moment; there's no safety net for that."

Since 1991 when he gave up a career as an airline pilot to follow a dream, Freeman has devoted himself to recreating aircraft from the earliest days of flight through the Golden Age of Flight in the 1930s.

For 15 years, Freeman flew "log-air" flights to U.S. military bases around the world for Zantop and for American International, starting as a flight engineer and leaving as a captain. During Desert Storm, he flew into Riyadh and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

"I gave up a good paying job to do what I wanted," he said.

Freeman estimates his current income at about a third of what he made as an airline pilot. But now he's in hot pursuit of a dream that includes a commercial museum on 68 acres he just bought at Kingsbury, a rural area not far from his present hangar site. Magnetized to the hangar refrigerator, in a Plexiglas frame, is Freeman's motto taken from a Charles Lindbergh quote declining a carte blanche job offer: "I decided that I would do nothing because of money that I did not want to, regardless of [the amount]."

His old planes draw their share of curious people from nearby Air Force bases in San Antonio. "People want to get involved," he said.

Last July, Freeman took Assistant Air Force Secretary Art Money for an acrobatic ride in a 1941 Meyer OTW biplane, one of five aircraft Freeman owns. He also owns a restored Thomas-Morse biplane, America's first attempt at building a fighter.

Freeman scours the land for antique aircraft parts - buying, selling and trading. "I've got 10 different deals going at any given time," he said. "We're always looking for sources for parts, material, special services."

Some of the replicas are built especially for museums. "They would fly, given proper engines," he said, "but they were restored for historical purposes, not to fly."

Others do take wing.

Freeman's longest flight in an antique-design plane was in a Fokker triwing, in a five-plane formation, from an airfield in northern Alabama to the international air show at Oshkosh, Wis.

"On our first landing [to refuel], I ground-looped," he said. "On the next landing an [German World War I] Albatross ran off the runway and into a soybean field. A Fokker D VII cartwheeled on another landing. Otherwise, it was a good trip."
 

AIRMAN Magazine Sept. 1996