WWI – The Great Waldo Pepper Meets Walter Mitty

Movie director, producer and writer Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) also owns New Zealand-based The Vintage Aviator Ltd. (TVAL), which, over the last decade, has become the world’s foremost constructor of reproduction World War I aircraft. These are not replicas but exact reproductions, even down to the accuracy of their structures and their restored or reverse-engineered engines and equipment. One airplane that was never expected to see the skies again was the German Albatros D.Va; this TVAL-built example, seen here at Oshkosh, is owned by famed aircraft collector Kermit Weeks, and first flew in April 2011. 

The Albatros D.Va features a formidably difficult-to-replicate monocoque plywood fuselage, a shark-shaped work of art. TVAL even had to manufacture its own plywood for the fuselage bulkheads. Despite challenges such as the laser-measurement of museum examples showing that original factory drawings often aren’t accurate, TVAL craftsmen are constructing what they believe to be the most accurate reproductions possible of the Albatros D.Va.

Based on factory drawings, TVAL set up a limited-production line for Morell anemometers that measured airspeed long before pitot tubes and instrument-panel-mounted airspeed indicator instruments. They won’t sell you one. Accurate working examples are available today in the U.S. Details from  [email protected]

The Albatros’ Mercedes engine was water cooled. Here TVAL have exactly replicated the whole cooling and wing-mounted-radiator system that allowed the pilot to control engine temperature. The fabric appears to be glowing because it is translucent; the sun is filtering in through the upper surfaces.

Not a Curtiss Jenny but a Standard J-1 (which was based on the Jenny), the EAA’s example has been painted in the yellow-and-black of the fictional barnstormer The Great Waldo Pepper, played in the movie of the same name by Robert Redford (the real movie plane is in the Historic Aircraft Restoration Museum, St. Louis). This aircraft was restored to its present condition in September 2013. It is powered by a Hispano-Suiza 8A V-8, giving it 60 hp more than the 90-hp OX-5 Jenny. 

The Fokker Dr.1 Triplane is the most famous German World War I fighter aircraft (although only 320 were built), largely due to the Schultz cartoon strip “Snoopy and the Red Baron” and the fact that Baron Manfred von Richtofen (The Red Baron) was killed in one. This replica, brought to Oshkosh by the Golden Age Aviation Museum of Bethel, Pennsylvania, is unusual in that it is powered by a WWI rotary engine. No original Fokker Triplanes are acknowledged to exist today, although, as with art, some secret collections are known to have parts.

Golden Age’s Fokker Dr.1 Triplane and Sopwith Pup nestle together at Oshkosh.

Robert Baslee and his Airdrome Aeroplanes have done more than anyone to popularize scaled WWI repilcas. Here, a Fokker Dr.1 is parked with a Baslee Fokker D.VIII.

Robert Baslee’s Airdrome Aeroplanes of Holden. Missouri, has listened to popular demand and created a full-sized replica of the Fokker D.VIII. Most of Baslee’s other very popular WWI types are aluminum-airframed scaled lookalikes, but with the super-sizing of the American population these have been proving a tight fit for modern pilots. Hence the venture into full-scale replicas but, Baslee hopes, with modern simplification. His D.VIII for example, adds wing struts to support his version of the vastly-more-complex cantilever wing that Anthony Fokker designed nearly 100 years ago.