A Skyvan revival story! 

It is great to see 51 November Sierra again. I've been around that airplane for a lot of years, had experiences flying that aircraft up in Alaska off and on for almost 20 years before moving the cool operation to Mitchell field in Milwaukee in about 90/91. It belonged to Frank Snyder who owned and operated a handfull of these things as North Star Air Cargo in Alaska. This bird spent a lot of time out on the tundra and the west coast of Alaska, everywhere from Scammon Bay and St Mary's, to Anchorage and Kodiak Island. Good Times. Would love to tell you about the time I actually had to hand prop a Skyvan tpe331 turbo prop. (40 below, landed and shut down. Got ready to leave, and couldn't get 10% to trip the igniters. Luckily there was two of us, I got out and it started hand spinning the propeller as hard as I could and I could get about five or six percent, my partner then hit the starter and it managed to go above 10% and pop the igniters and we were off to the races) only in Alaska. The aircraft was operated out of Mitchell Field in Milwaukee for many years, flying night freight for Burlington and FedEx out of Dothan Alabama, Panama City beach in Florida, up in Pennsylvania West Virginia you name it. Hauled everything from horses and ammunition to jet fuel to over 80 Eskimo villages three times a day. I don't remember if that was the N number we ferried to Hawaii, with 8 50 gallon barrels of fuel in the cargo bay, all tied together with portable fuel pump and the jungle of 1-in fuel line that we plumbed in directly to the main tank, two of us up front, taking turns pumping fuel into the tank. Departing Anchorage Non-Stop to Honolulu. Using a loran. Had a cooler full of sandwiches on the floor, and a 5 gallon bucket to piss in. Quite the flight. Loud. Last I heard it had been sold to Skydive Arizona I think, or somewhere down around Perry. It looks like you changed the N number to 60 echo alpha? It warms my soul to see 51 November Sierra again. Treat her good she's had a long hard life. I always kind of wanted to put one on floats. What do you think? Oh by the way I've jumped out of that thing a bunch of times too, over 700 skydives. Blue skies.

Great job. My grandfather worked as a "fitter" on many of these types of Skyvan in Shorts in Belfast. Great to see it in the air again.

Congratulations Eagle Air Transport and Skydive Chicago! If there's anyone that could pull this off, it would be you guys. Always setting the bar high with next level experiences! SDC will always be the BEST DZ in the USA.

My uncle Jack Sherburn DFC was a test pilot for Shorts and took the sky van around the world demonstrating its capability. You can Google his obituary and brief history of what he achieved.

bravo, great job. this needs to be made into a DVD and sold..

Congratulations to the team! It's great to see 60EA finally get in the air where she belongs.

Engineer: "What's the most material-efficient way to enclose a volume with flat surfaces and the fewest joints?" Other engineer: "Make a cube, like this." Engineer: "Cool! Now put wings on it!" Other engineer: "Wait, what?" Behold, the Skyvan. They look weird. They work.

Mad respect for all of you guys!!!! I'm a skydiver and motorcycle tech. I've been considering going after an AMP certification. This is absolutely inspirational!!!

Congratulations!!

I had forgotten what it was like to use a crescent wrench on everything, they're not just metric but they're British standard. The bastard child of dimensional tools. Nobody owns one. God bless the crescent wrench