Airport board chairman has high flying hobby
J. Robert Owens says it’s “kind of a wintertime hobby. I play golf in the summer.”
He wasn’t referring to skiing or coin collecting.
Owens, who is known to friends as “Bobby” and to many other people as the new chairman of the Blue Grass Airport board, rebuilds historic warplanes.
Hundreds of his fellow members of the Rotary Club of Lexington learned of Owens’ hobby on Thursday when he was introduced as guest speaker at the club’s weekly meeting.
Between Labor Day 2003 and Aug. 3, 2005, Owens and friends rebuilt a 1942 Piper L-4A, a military version of the legendary Piper Cub, that saw service during World War II.
His L-4A is now the oldest aircraft of its type still flying, out of about 7,000 L-4’s built for World War II service.
“My plane was one of the first 50 that were delivered to the Army Air Forces and it ended up flying submarine patrol for a year out of Jacksonville, Fla.,” he said last week.
Later, the light, single-engine plane did various jobs for the military until it was sold to civilian aviators near the end of the war in 1945.
Owens, who has been a pilot since he was 18, is the 18th owner of the aircraft, which is now officially known as N49750.
“I bought it in pieces from a guy in 1992 and started restoring it about 10 years later,” he said, laughing. “It was a lot of fun.”
His account of the restoration project, which started after a previous restoration effort failed to get off the ground, can be found at warbird-central.com.
The posting includes the reaction of his wife, Debbie, to his more-or-less spur -of-the-moment purchase of the plane — in pieces — in Dalton, Ga.
Every married guy will know what Owens means when he writes, “Sometimes wives don’t appreciate the passion of men’s hobbies when opportunities present themselves.”
At any rate, since the restored N49750 flew on Aug. 3, 2005, Owens has worked with friends on other restoration projects.
“We are just a bunch of hobbyists who have old World War II aircraft,” he adds. “We have one P-51 (Mustang fighter plane) that’s just gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.”
