Sages of the skies and their planes STORY AND PHOTOS BY BILLIE JEAN GERKE
T
ed Farmin and Charlie Brown have at least a couple things in common: a deep love of aviation and surviving a light airplane crash together in 1979. The photo in the Dec. 10, 1979, edition of the Sandpoint Daily Bee showed it well: The plane had plunged nose first into the ground, the tail with its N number standing vertically against a backdrop of trees. Brown, 74, says he remembers lying where he had been thrown from the fuselage: “The fuel caps had popped. Gas was everywhere, and some guy was standing there with a cigarette.” The friends met through aviation in 1968, when Brown came to Sandpoint Marina looking to get help from Farmin on welding a Baby Ace, the first plane he built.
Today, 35 years later, the aviators are still flying and helping each other build and restore airplanes. “We’ve been too busy to be enemies,” Brown said. Farmin, 73, pulls out a money clip Brown gave him 35 years ago – around the time they wrecked the Cessna L-19 Bird Dog owned by Brown. Farmin was flying the plane when it stalled. “I had never flown one before. I should have had some instruction. I got too low and too slow,” said Farmin. While both of them have flown as a hobby and bought and sold airplanes, their interests diverged when it came to the type of planes they flew. Farmin became interested in homebuilt airplanes and bought his first kit in the mid1970s, a Sonerai II that he built from scratch. Brown, meantime, got into antiques with his 1946 Fairchild F-24-R, which took six years for him to rebuild from a pile of junk on a trailer. “I like the history that goes with them,” Brown said, of antique airplanes. WINTER 2015
Farmin’s interest in aviation started shortly after World War II, when his father took flying lessons on the GI Bill. He tagged along during the lessons, and they built a model airplane together. His dad bought a plane, put it on floats and kept it at the marina. Farmin learned the basics from him and started flying that plane pretty efficiently by age 13. Sadly, his father died in an auto accident when he was 15 and the plane was sold. The seeds his father planted became fertile, though, and Farmin
Ted Farmin and Charlie Brown, top, show off their airplanes, from left, a Taylorcraft, RV-4 and Fairchild. Brown keeps his airplanes in a hangar at Bonners Ferry, above. The two have been pilots and friends since the 1960s
SANDPOINT MAGAZINE
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