West Coast Air Creations

A Douglas DC–3 is displayed as a monument on the street side in the roundabout at the airport entrance, and two DC–3s are parked on the ramp—Virginia Ann and Flabob Express. Following the hangar row down, West Coast Air Creations is easy to spot, with its open door flanked by bright and inviting aircraft—today, a cherry red Hatz and a cream-colored Luscombe.

If Flabob is a living history museum, West Coast Air Creations is one of its curators. WCAC is a full-service restoration shop, completing everything from standard annuals on vintage aircraft to full rebuilds of antique aircraft from the data plate out. With in-house part fabrication, paint, fabric recovering, wing builds, and a recently started radial engine partner business on the field, nearly every step of a restoration can be completed on site.

From fabric to full restorations

The Mendoza brothers, Leandro (goes by Nando) and Hualdo (pronounced Waldo), started the shop about 10 years ago after falling into aviation by accident.

“So, there was a high school coordinator who had offered Hualdo like, ‘Hey, you want a part-time job?’ Because we’re out riding bikes and meeting people in groups. And we were all over the place creating chaos everywhere,” Nando said.

“That lady saw something in Hualdo. I mean, ‘I can help these guys stay off the street after school.’ So, she came down. There’s some funding available through the state. She put together a program, and she went to different local businesses and was asking if they would hire high school kids to come do any kind of work they wanted them to do.”

Flabob was one of the spots that signed up to help the community.

“Well, we show up and Jon Goldenbaum had a DC–3 aileron laid out on some sawhorses and he says, ‘I’m going to teach you guys all there is to know about fabric,’” said Hualdo.

“We come down and we meet Jon and the rest is kind of history,” said Nando. “It’s like we learned about airplanes and aerodynamics and components. And he started teaching us fabric covering. We thought we were going to come down and do some landscaping and pick up some trash. They were just going to give you a task. I don’t know what we were going to do. But no, Jon stepped up and said, ‘No, we’re gonna teach you guys a trade. We’re gonna teach you fabric covering.’ Because he owned PolyFiber, which is a supplier for all the fabric, his idea was, ‘I’m going to bring these guys in and teach them how to put my system on airplanes, on components, wings, tail sections, whatever.’ And that’s what he did.”

This after-school program did the trick and since then the brothers have been working in the restoration biz. After beginning with Goldenbaum, they joined Mark Lightsey’s team when he moved his shop AeroCraftsman from nearby Hemet to Flabob.

“We worked under Mark for a good 10 years and from day one Mark, he told us ‘Hey, learn everything you can learn because in 10 years I’m out of California,’” said Hualdo. “And you know 10 years go by pretty quick, so after the ninth year we realized that Mark was serious because he buys property in Tennessee.

“We started buying tools and kind of setting ourselves up for this departure that he had told us about. So, when he decided to move, we were ready. We learned a lot from him,” Hualdo said. “We tried to soak up all the information from all these older guys that were around and once he moved out he left us with two big projects and at first, we’re a little worried, you know just my brother and I, and what are we going to do? We just, we’ll figure it out.”

Antique, vintage, and contemporary

What’s the difference?

By Alicia Herron

Antique is generally defined in the aviation community as aircraft built before August 31, 1945. The FAA alternatively defines antique as any aircraft more than 30 years old. However, with the FAA’s broader definition, we’d be putting a Beech Staggerwing, a Cessna 172, and in a couple years, the earliest Cirrus SR20s in the same boat, which doesn’t feel quite right.

Fly-ins offer alternative parameters. To park in Vintage at Sun ’n Fun or EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, your aircraft must have been manufactured before December 31, 1970. But that almost feels too modern as well—and is someone really going around checking the airplanes’ manufacture dates?

“I think of it like anything pre-World War II is an antique and anything after through the 1960s or so is vintage, but that’s a personal opinion of course,” says Michelle Walker, AOPA video producer, vintage aircraft owner, and former employee of Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York. “There were so many technological advancements made during that time period that many of the postwar airplanes just seem so different than the pre-war ones. My husband and I are the proud owners of a 1946 Cessna 140 and although owning a vintage airplane sometimes poses additional challenges such as parts availability, it teaches us a lot about basic stick and rudder skills and we love being able to share the history of the airplane with people. It truly feels like we’re the current caretakers of the airplane, helping its legacy continue on.”

Perhaps we should define the categories by the care required? Can a vintage aircraft with a glass panel still be considered vintage, or are the bones and engine all that matter? Is a newly restored aircraft still spiritually as old as its data plate? Will we ever think of a Cessna 172 as antique? Time will tell.

Those two big projects were high-end restorations of a Beechcraft Staggerwing and a Travel Air, both with an EAA AirVenture Oshkosh deadline. The brothers worked nonstop to prep for the trip and came home from the show with a couple of awards and a sense of relief—they could do this.

“It kind of opened up my mind to like, hey, we got this done. We can do more with it,” said Nando. “With time and experience, I picked up ways to talk to customers over the phone and send them emails and do stuff like that to bring in some more jobs. And then pretty soon, some of the customers that were leaving the shop were referring us to other customers, friends, or whoever they may be around.”

The growth has never stopped. Since the business started, the brothers have stayed busy. They’ve kept all the old contacts, and catalog and digitize everything they learn for themselves and posterity. Now Nando splits his time between the office and the floor, and Hualdo is also a multiengine instructor for the Flabob Express, which West Coast maintains. WCAC’s restorations are truly museum-worthy, and several projects will indeed go on to museums, but they’ll all leave the shop airworthy.

“You know it started from day one when West Coast opened it was my brother and I, and I believe Doug [Turner] and we had one other guy Mike who moved on to bigger and better things but so just the four of us. It was a little bit of a slow process, but we were able to keep the lights on, and we were never slow for the team that we had. We had four people. Once we all grew we went and got more people—you know six, now we have seven or eight guys working here,” said Hualdo.

The team is full of specialists, and the clean hangar is buzzing with activity around projects in varying stages. The bones of a Staggerwing rest in one corner, while Hualdo works on a Piper J–3. The fuselage of a Waco takes only a slice out of the middle of the hangar, and mechanics Craig Cameron, day-one mechanic Doug Turner, and his son, apprentice Joshua Turner, are focused on the restoration that’s the furthest along, also a Waco. In only a couple of months, this one will be ready to fly.

“I have three sons, and I was only able to infect one of them with the aviation bug,” said Doug. “And he seems pretty well smitten.”

Joshua has his powerplant certification, which he earned at nearby Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology, and is working on adding the airframe part as well. He’s learning a lot, and in an environment where he’s always able to ask questions, and the occasional ride offer balances out the relative drudgery of regular drives to and from nearby Aircraft Spruce in Corona.

“It’s really cool to work on them and be involved in the rare, cool airplanes like this,” said Joshua, who intends to get his pilot certificate in the future.

While the Waco is almost ready to go, it has been a long journey. This one was a family airplane from northern California that sat grounded for years after the pilot died. He’d taught his sons to fly in it, and instead of letting it rot, the family decided to restore it and intends to keep it flying. Even with a straightforward restoration like this one, with a known history, each project is challenging in its own way, says Craig Cameron.

“Mainly, these planes are from the 1930s, so there’s no shop where you can just go get parts off the shelf,” he says. “We have to call around, speak to some old guys, some old timers that might know places to go. And that can be a little challenging, you know, making the right calls, speaking to the right people to get you in touch with someone who has what you’re looking for, or at least drawings where we can then fabricate what we need.”

The team prefers to be involved from the very beginning. Being on site for a restoration and carefully taking apart an aircraft allows the team to gain the best understanding of the state of the aircraft and learn about it in the process. But sometimes projects come to them already in pieces, and like a fossil, it can be a game of best guesses and meticulous research to put the bones together and back into a recognizable shape.

The island and the palm tree

The Mendozas started with fabric, and it remains a necessary cornerstone of their shop. A few rows away from their primary front row hangar is the heart of the fabric shop. Wings wallpaper the hangar and even more rest hammocked in slings in the back. This quiet corner, which could be either a peaceful retreat or a torturous oubliette, is where mechanic and fabric expert Eric Rodriguez spends most of his time. With a twinkle in his eye, he asks if we’d want to learn how to rib stitch. He promises that it’ll be fun, that it taught him patience, and that it’ll teach us patience, too. This is both an offer and a warning.

We head to a wing where there’s a long needle with a curve at the end. Rodriguez patiently walks me through the steps, each of which indeed requires patience, from the awkward posture, to the precision needed to guide the long needle in one side of the wing and out the other, plus the care needed when working on a relatively delicate part of the build that with big errors (Rodriguez tells us about a nightmarish paint mix-up) could mean a total recovering.

Down the needle goes on one side, all the way to the bottom. Then up on the other side. Then it is time for the fancy knot that’ll keep it all in place.

“I’m just going to teach you how Hualdo taught me,” says Rodriguez. I feel like I have two left hands, but Rodriguez has an endearing and sincere patience that makes it feel like I’m being taught by an older cousin I want to impress with my tenacity.

The first step, putting the long needle into the wing, is easy, but everything else is hard. Even finding the pre-punched needle exit on the bottom of the wing is a challenge. I don’t want to push too hard because I don’t want to puncture the fabric, but in my awkward posture (on my knees and bending down to see under the wing) it is a strain of both physicality and dexterity. I finally manage to get the needle and thread through, then bring them up the other side and back to the top of the wing. This is the fun part, when the all-important knot must be tied. Rodriguez demonstrates, then undoes his work and talks me through it. First make a figure eight, then bring the tail under and through—make an island of thread, then bring the string around the palm tree of thread in the middle. Then pull it tight. Push the finished knot carefully into the wing so it doesn’t snag. You’re done! Now do it several hundred more times, just for this one wing. With a biplane, you’ve got three more after this. That first knot took me a couple minutes, no joke, but I did a few more and improved marginally with each stitch. This could be the best form of meditation, once you get in the groove, or slightly torturous. Rodriguez notes that no matter how experienced he’s gotten, there’s only so fast you can go. Patience is always a necessity.

Fly away home

Restoration journeys frequently span many years. When it is time for the airplane to finally fly away, it can be an emotional day all around. The team variably describes it as a nerve-wracking relief, where they mentally go over every nut and bolt; or a thorn being removed from your side; or an amazing achievement; and sometimes even a little sad, because you’ve spent by this point years bonding with the airplane. But the goal is to see the restorations out of the shop, and each time one departs, it is ultimately, in their eyes, a good thing.

As long as there are pilots flying vintage airplanes, these aircraft will need informed and specialized attention from passionate mechanics. We can only hope that West Coast Air Creations will remain a stalwart of the restoration industry for generations of aviators to come.

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