‘Build A Plane’ starts second year in Talkeetna

TALKEETNA — We’ve all been there before — you just want to do something that should be easy, then all of a sudden your effort snowballs into something big.

It’s not always a bad thing. Just ask Rebecca Fisher.

“I just wanted to teach a couple of kids how to fly for free,” she said.

Fisher is a commercial pilot, flying for Alaska Airlines, Rust’s Flying Service and a couple of other companies.

“I have mentored pilots for years,” she said.

The idea to teach those kids led her to the Mat-Su Borough School District, where she found out schools here don’t really have aviation programs anymore.

“With a big community of aviation like Talkeetna has, it’s kind of a bummer,” Fisher said.

So she got people together to set one up. They did that, but they didn’t stop there.

“At the same time, we started the Build A Plane project,” Fisher said.

Build A Plane is not associated with the school district, but is a local version of a national program that takes donated, wrecked planes and brings them back to life.

“You get kids involved in STEM activities — science, technology, engineering and math — without them really knowing it,” Fisher said. “We want them to be engineers and NASA astronauts.”

The program started in the fall of last year. Fisher said she has been blown away at the amount of generosity she’s encountered.

One of the biggest contributors has been Matanuska Electric Association, which has let the Build A Plane project use its warehouse near the Talkeetna Airport. Fisher said the building is old and ugly and, until they moved in, barely used. It’d been used as a community playhouse in the past, but was about to be condemned and torn down.

She can’t say enough good things about MEA. Programs nationally and even in Anchorage struggle to get off the ground for lack of a big, free space like that. And MEA has agreed to cover utilities and even offered to put in Internet service if Build A Plane needed it.

“There’s just nothing that we have trouble with,” Fisher said.

MEA’s general manager, Joe Griffith, donated the program’s first plane, a Stinson 108-3 that crashed near Talkeetna.

Fisher said they were grateful to get the plane but when they got it back to the warehouse they realized they’d probably have to set it aside.

“The project was more involved than we were ready to take on,” Fisher said.

They’re hanging onto it, though, for practice and maybe to put together sometime down the road. Meanwhile, they’ve gotten hold of a second plane, a 1973, six-seat Cherokee Six that a man by the name of C.W. Harder in Big Lake donated.

The plane is still not ideal — ideal would be a smaller, fabric plane that could get rehabilitated in a year for $20,000 — but it’s doable.

“It’s at least a two-year timeline. It might be a three,” Fisher said.

And it’s going to be a $90,000 project.

In the course of the last year the program made huge progress, Fisher said, stripping the plane down and riveting pieces back in place. Northern Air Cargo airlifted a junked Cherokee a now-defunct air service donated from its scrapyard. Build A Plane has scavenged seats, rudder pedals and numerous other things.

“We’re still scavenging off of that,” Fisher said.

On the fundraising side, there has also been quite a bit of work put in, so much so that Fisher worried, when going down the list, that she might leave someone out. The program has taken in donations from the Jessica Stevens Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, Alaska Airlines, the Wolf Air Foundation and lodge owner Bob Gillam. The local Napa gave tools and other materials. A Talkeetna woman whose husband died asked that in lieu of flowers donations be made to Build A Plane.

“And then this Snap-on guy shows up,” Fisher said.

Aksel Buholm is a local dealer for the tool company. He toured the warehouse and liked what he saw. Fisher said that for most of last year the mechanics who volunteered their time to teach the kids brought tools with them and took them home at night. Buholm noticed this.

“Two months later, Aksel pulls up with this crazy truck and unloads this giant $5,000 toolbox loaded with sets of tools for the kids,” she said.

When he went to a Snap-on Tools convention, Buholm started asking around and wound up getting the company to greatly increase the discount it had been offering to Build A Plane programs across the country.

Aviall, the place most Alaskans go for airplane parts, has also stepped in with a substantial discount.

“Just astonishingly generous,” is how she would describe everyone who has lent a hand.

The idea is to fix the plane up, sell it and use the proceeds to fund the next project.

“We hope to never fundraise again,” she said.

The mechanics who teach the kids are all volunteer, she said. She wants to do something to thank them, but she knows how that would go over.

“If I even bought them a dinner they’d be like, ‘What’re you doing? Why isn’t that going into the airplane?’” she said.

There’s still a whole lot to do, though.

“We need two wings,” Fisher said. The accident that put their Cherokee out of commission was a hard landing. “It drove the gear right up through the wings.”

There’s got to be a pair of wings out there someone wants to donate, though. The planes are popular among air services.

“There’s all these graveyards all over Alaska of Cherokee 6s,” she said.

She said that when the program first started she worried it would fizzle. She decided to keep going after someone pointed out that if even one kid goes into aviation as a result, the project was worth it.

When a kid puts in 50 hours he or she gets a Build A Plane jacket. And every 20 hours worked after that scores them a flight lesson.

Last year, 18 kids came through Build A Plane’s doors. Six of them wound up working at the Talkeetna Airport this summer.

“Getting that many kids working at the airport in one summer is a big, big deal,” Fisher said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.