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frustratedpilotHey.
As I posted a couple weeks ago, I had been making a habit of going through my old photographs, the vast majority of them taken the ten year span between graduating high school and my leaving Florida (1996). And it was in that stack of prints that I found a puzzle of sorts that I found the answer to overnight.
As a student pilot at Hernando County Airport, a group of "mystery planes" caught my notice: five Fokker F-27 turboprop commuter liners, at first parked on the closed northern runway, and eventually moved to a parking area near the new repair hangar once it had been built. Their liveries were either obscured or totally absent. I didn't know where they had come from or why they were at that particular airport at the time.
Now, you ask, why would I be concerned about these planes? I wasn't overly concerned, just back-of-my-mind interested. Most of the time they were there, they were the biggest planes on the field--the same size as the WW2 heavy bombers Brooksville AAF (the original name for Hernando County Airport) was built to handle. Their presense was a little intriguing. Was a charter airline planning on using HCA as a base? Did the planes belong to the government, as some sort of drug seizure? Were they being refurbished for some super-rich big shot as his personal aircraft?
Turns out they had at least a little story to tell: they were late property of Business Express (better known in aviation circles as "Bexair"), obtained as part of the former Pilgrim Airlines fleet. Bexair bought out Pilgrim the same year I started college, and the planes moved to Florida around 1988. Evidently the management at Bexair decided they didn't need the Fokkers and sold them to a broker in Miami. Three of the planes were in partial Bexair livery, but it seems likely that the other two were just stripped of their Pilgrim livery in anticipation of a repainting...and Bexair changed their minds. By the time I myself left Florida for Tennessee, the planes had left as well: two to South America and the other three to Gambia on the west coast of Africa.
Ultimately, the facts don't surprise me much; it's an airplane's function to go from one place to another, after all. But these machines are either my age or older, and evidently still in useful careers whereever they are. They weren't even new when Pilgrim bought them from other air carriers in other parts of the world...that part of their life cycle was a short six or seven years. The trip taken is interesting when you take it...even if it's just shuttling salesmen and bureaucrats around the Boswash area.
BTW, they weren't the only planes with the Fokker name that I knew at the time: at Clearwater Airpark, someone had built a Fokker D-VII biplane replica and I was lucky enough to visit it and get my picture taken in its cockpit. The plane was overall white, finished in the markings for German air ace and between-the-wars aerobatic star Ernst Udet.
I wonder if that plane is still in Florida.
As I posted a couple weeks ago, I had been making a habit of going through my old photographs, the vast majority of them taken the ten year span between graduating high school and my leaving Florida (1996). And it was in that stack of prints that I found a puzzle of sorts that I found the answer to overnight.
As a student pilot at Hernando County Airport, a group of "mystery planes" caught my notice: five Fokker F-27 turboprop commuter liners, at first parked on the closed northern runway, and eventually moved to a parking area near the new repair hangar once it had been built. Their liveries were either obscured or totally absent. I didn't know where they had come from or why they were at that particular airport at the time.
Now, you ask, why would I be concerned about these planes? I wasn't overly concerned, just back-of-my-mind interested. Most of the time they were there, they were the biggest planes on the field--the same size as the WW2 heavy bombers Brooksville AAF (the original name for Hernando County Airport) was built to handle. Their presense was a little intriguing. Was a charter airline planning on using HCA as a base? Did the planes belong to the government, as some sort of drug seizure? Were they being refurbished for some super-rich big shot as his personal aircraft?
Turns out they had at least a little story to tell: they were late property of Business Express (better known in aviation circles as "Bexair"), obtained as part of the former Pilgrim Airlines fleet. Bexair bought out Pilgrim the same year I started college, and the planes moved to Florida around 1988. Evidently the management at Bexair decided they didn't need the Fokkers and sold them to a broker in Miami. Three of the planes were in partial Bexair livery, but it seems likely that the other two were just stripped of their Pilgrim livery in anticipation of a repainting...and Bexair changed their minds. By the time I myself left Florida for Tennessee, the planes had left as well: two to South America and the other three to Gambia on the west coast of Africa.
Ultimately, the facts don't surprise me much; it's an airplane's function to go from one place to another, after all. But these machines are either my age or older, and evidently still in useful careers whereever they are. They weren't even new when Pilgrim bought them from other air carriers in other parts of the world...that part of their life cycle was a short six or seven years. The trip taken is interesting when you take it...even if it's just shuttling salesmen and bureaucrats around the Boswash area.
BTW, they weren't the only planes with the Fokker name that I knew at the time: at Clearwater Airpark, someone had built a Fokker D-VII biplane replica and I was lucky enough to visit it and get my picture taken in its cockpit. The plane was overall white, finished in the markings for German air ace and between-the-wars aerobatic star Ernst Udet.
I wonder if that plane is still in Florida.
