On the morning of June 30 at the Marathon International Airport, 92-year-old Korean War vet Douglas Hurtubise climbed up on the wing and into the cockpit of a 1941 BT-13 trainer aircraft with the ease of a man 40 years his junior.
The ensuing flight with Island Warbirds and Florida Keys Flight Academy operator Sol Bradman took Hurtubise on a scenic tour of the Seven Mile Bridge and Sombrero Lighthouse in the vintage aircraft before returning to the airport for a flashy low-flying pass by his family.
Comfort with aircraft is nothing new to Hurtubise. A pilot himself, he served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955. He was stationed at Kimpo Air Force Base, sighting in, loading and repairing cameras and weaponry on jets as part of the armaments division.
He even owned a nearly identical plane himself in the 1960s, striking gold in Arizona and paying $1,450 for the bird before flying it back to Buffalo, New York.
“They didn’t have a lot of navigation back then,” his wife Sandie told the Weekly. “It was more or less by the seat of his pants.”
Hurtubise said he owned the plane for six or seven years. And when his friend and co-owner “bellied” the aircraft on a bad takeoff, essentially ruining the plane, Hurtubise found a second empty body in Canada, picked it up for $350, drove it back over the border to the U.S. and swapped his original plane’s engine in to keep flying.
“Because of economic times I (eventually) had to get rid of it, but that was sort of a mistake,” Doug said with a laugh. “The value of those airplanes right now is about $400,000.”
Driving past the plane on the tarmac on his trips through Marathon, Hurtubise was treated to the surprise flight by his daughter and son-in-law, Wendy and Ken Parker, and had nothing but praise for Bradman’s operation.
“It was wonderful, it really was,” he said. “They were all very friendly people, and Sol even let me fly it a little bit. I was able to maneuver the plane without a problem, and all that stuff came back to me.”
