ITHACA, N.Y. – When the Tommy plane was built in Ithaca in 1918, just a decade and a half had passed since the Wright brothers’ first powered flight. Another decade would pass before Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, another half before Amelia Earhart did the same. Aviation was in its infancy, and Ithaca was at the forefront.
A hundred years after leaving the Ithaca workshop where it was built, a Tommy plane will fly again. The plane’s centennial flight on Saturday will bring Ithaca’s aviation history back to life.
Don Funke spearheaded the plane’s painstaking restoration. When Funke first stepped into the workshop on South Aurora Street where Tommy planes were built, he said he got goosebumps. He wants to share that experience with others.
“I want people to be able to touch and smell and hear it … how else can you get that feeling?” Funke said. “It’s living history.”
On Sept. 29, the public will have a chance to experience a Tommy up close when the Ithaca Aviation Heritage Foundation hosts the restored plane’s centennial celebration. The plane will take off from the Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport, flying for the first time since the 1930s.
The flight marks the culmination of IAHF’s decade-long “Tommy Come Home” campaign, which tracked a Tommy from its Ithaca origin to a San Diego museum and brought it back to its birthplace. IAHF volunteers contributed thousands of hours of labor so that the plane could fly again.
Tommy’s roundtrip journey
The Tommy plane’s story begins in 1918, when the Thomas-Morse Aircraft Corporation fulfilled its first contract from the U.S. Army. World War I was the first military conflict to use aviation on a broad scale. When the U.S. decided to enter the fray, the military needed to quickly train pilots.
The Curtiss Aeroplane Company, based in Hammondsport, New York, sent two-seat training planes to bases across the country. These planes were nicknamed “the Jenny,” and their dual-control system made them ideal for beginner pilots.
When cadets were ready to graduate to solo-flights, that’s where the Tommy came in. The Tommy is a single-seat biplane with controls mimicking the scout planes used for reconnaissance missions on the European front.
The Thomas-Morse company sent S-4B planes, the same model as the IAHF’s Tommy, to the U.S. Army and Navy and the British Army. They became ubiquitous at training bases. The company produced a few variations on the original model and sent about 600 planes in total to the military.
As quickly as the Tommy rose to prominence, though, its prospects dimmed. The S-4B relied on an engine with fluted metal cylinders that were costly to produce. Engineering advances soon made the engine obsolete.
When the war ended, the plant’s military contracts were cancelled. The company designed a prototype for a next-generation airplane that would go on to be wildly successful, but credit went to the fledgling company that bought the plans from Thomas-Morse and mass-manufactured the plane: Boeing.
When the Thomas-Morse company’s plane business dried up, Ithaca’s aviation history was largely forgotten. The Morse Chain Company workshop on South Aurora Street was rededicated to other projects, like making chains and typewriters. The nearly 1100 workers who had built the planes moved into other roles in Ithaca’s growing economy.
The room where Tommy planes were assembled fell into disuse. It was locked behind wire gates, gathering dust for decades.
That is how Funke found it when he peered through an opening into the room more than 10 years ago. He was intrigued by what lay in the caged-off workshop. He asked a facilities manager at the building, at that time housing the Emerson Power Transmission company, if he could go in. He found a bandsaw, a joiner, miscellaneous woodworking tools.
Funke said he could picture the workers a hundred years before crafting wings and testing engines. He imagined them trekking to work over muddy, rutted streets. He imagined the work they’d done before, maybe as blacksmiths, buggy makers or boat builders. He imagined them poring over plans with wonder, perhaps never having seen an airplane before.
“I had this surreal feeling,” Funke said. “This is where it all happened.”
Funke was hooked on the Tommy from the day he stepped into the workshop, and he gradually got dozens of others hooked too. They sifted through records at the Tompkins History Center and did years of detective work to track down surviving planes from the plant.
They traced one to a museum in San Diego and found out it was on loan from a private owner. It was not on display; the museum and owner were deliberating over what to do with it. The IAHF marked this Tommy as potentially acquirable and pinned their hopes on getting it. They fundraised and strategized. In 2009, fate intervened.
The plane was owned by a doctor named William Thibault. At 2009’s Ithaca Festival, the IAHF had rented a booth to fundraise for their Tommy Come Home campaign. Who should stop by that booth but Dr. Thibault’s wife and grandchild? As luck would have it, Dr. Thibault’s daughter lived in Ithaca. On Christmas Eve that year, when Dr. Thibault was in town to see his family, he gifted the plane to the IAHF. Tommy was on its way home.
The feel of flying a Tommy
The Tommy plane smells like castor oil and freshly cut wood. The fabric covering its wings feels like a tightly pulled tarp, the leather around the cockpit like a soft glove. When the plane’s wire cables are plucked, they sing like an upright bass, low and resonant.
It is an aerobatic plane, capable of deft maneuvers. It can roll and bank sharp curves. No pilot would dare try those moves today, though, according to Funke.
“They were daredevils back then,” he said.
On Saturday, Ken Cassens will pilot the plane. Cassens is one of a handful of pilots in the world Funke said the IAHF would have entrusted with the flight, chosen for his experience flying planes with similar rotor engines.
Cassens will not be doing any rolls or loops, though. After taking the Tommy for a series of test-runs, Funke said Cassens told him, “It sure flies like a Tommy – and that’s not a compliment!”
The plane’s controls are crude: a large joystick to control the wing flaps, and two pedals linked to the tail rudder. The joystick demands a firm pull even when the plane is stationary. Flying at speed, Funke said it requires some real muscle to move.
As crude as the controls are, the elements that keep the plane aloft are finely-tuned. The cables linking the wings to the fuselage are calibrated just so to stabilize the plane. “You could almost tune them by ear,” Funke said, recounting how Cassens walked into the workshop where volunteers had spent hours adjusting cable tension, plucked a line with his finger and correctly declared it too loose.
The wooden propeller on the plane’s front is a precision instrument, originally built by a piano maker. When Thomas-Morse began producing planes, few trades companies could make wood pieces with the level of precision and consistency needed for flight, so they contracted a piano company. On Saturday a replacement part made with state-of-the-art manufacturing tools will used for flight, but the original propeller is available for visitors to see.
There are few surviving Tommy planes, and Ithaca’s is alone in its fitness for flight. Funke said IAHF never could have recruited so many volunteers and gained so much community support if not for the promise that the Tommy would fly again. When it flies, he said, he’s going to cry.
After the flight, the plane will be displayed at the Tompkins Center for History and Culture, which is currently under construction on the Ithaca Commons and is set to open in 2019. The plane will not be hung from the ceiling. “That would have been a non-starter,” Funke said.
It will be on the floor, where visitors can touch it and smell it and hear it. “We’re willing to risk a few scratches,” Funke said, to share the history of aviation with kids. Funke said multiple generations worked on the restoration project as volunteers. On Saturday, his grandsons will be among the wing walkers processing with the plane to the runway.
The flight, he said, will be a dream realized. “We wanted to preserve living history, that’s what it’s all about… I think we succeeded,” Funke said.
Tommy’s Centennial Flight is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 29 from 2 to 5 p.m. at the Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport. In the event of bad weather, it will be rescheduled for Sept. 30. Visit the Ithaca Aviation Heritage Foundation’s website for more information.
Featured image courtesy of Ithaca Aviation Heritage Foundation.