Special Feature Bill Sanches: Off Flying Again, Soon Bill Sanches has piloted everything from a single-engine trainer to a B-52 bomber, and eventually he'll be flying his own plane — one that he started building in the basement of his house on White Oak Forest Road. "It's been fun and challenging," said Sanches who lives with his wife Joyce near Houston but spends several months a year in their second home on the Mountain. "I've spent at least two thousand hours working on the plane and will probably spend another thousand before I can test fly it." When it's completed, he will have built a 24-foot-long, single-engine, four-seat aircraft made of metal and fiberglass composite with a 32-foot wingspan. "This is something I really want to accomplish." Sanches fell in love with flying when he was a youngster. "I had an uncle who was in the Air Force and after he retired, he made model airplanes. He would hang them from the ceiling in his basement and whenever I went down there, I would think, 'Wow, that's pretty neat.'" Sanches earned his wings after graduating from the United States Air Force Academy in 1965 and served in the Vietnam War, flying the Cessna 0-2 Skymaster, a plane with twin tail booms and an engine mounted on the front and rear of the fuselage. As a forward air controller, Sanches flew low over enemy territory, marking targets with smoke rockets, coordinating air strikes and reporting target damage. He left the Air Force with the rank of captain and flew for nearly 20 years with Eastern Airlines until it ceased operations in 1989. He then joined Airborne Express as a pilot and retired in 2006. In the fall of that year, he began his next great challenge — building his own plane from a kit that included thousands of parts and rivets and hundreds of yards of cable and wire. After he purchased the kit, it was put in a large crate and transported by a tractor trailer to Fairview. "There was no way the truck was going to get up our mountain, so I had the driver park it at the Ingles parking lot," Sanches recalled. Fortunately, his neighbor Gary Bolick had a flat bed trailer which was used to transfer the sections of the kit to Sanches's home. But it took several trips. "I bought a 'quick-build' kit, which means that some of the larger pieces like the fuselage were already put together. It took four people to carry it into my basement." Calling the kit a "quick-build" is a misnomer, he said. "Joyce and I spent three days just doing the inventory because there were several thousand parts, not including the thousands of rivets and bolts of different sizes." He and his nephew took a three-week introductory course in plane-building in Georgia. "We built the flight surfaces like the flaps and ailerons," Sanches said. "Then we brought them up to the mountain. I've been working on the plane off and on since." It has been a tedious, time-consuming progression. Although he has a large basement, it's not a hangar, which means he couldn't build the whole aircraft there. "During the building process in the basement, I would put the wing on and make all the pieces fit. Then I would take it off and put on the other wing, make it fit and then take it apart again. It's been a process of putting it on and taking it off." This spring, he finally reached the stage where he had to move the plane in sections out of the basement. "It was getting to the point where I knew the next step was going to make it too big for my house. I had to take the wheels and tail off as well as the canopy and the doors. It took six people to take it out." The unfinished aircraft was trucked to a hangar at Griffin Airport in Griffin, Georgia, south of Atlanta, where he usually spends three days a week working on the plane. During assembly, the aircraft gets regularly inspected by knowledgeable persons approved by the FAA. He hopes to have the plane built by the end of 2011. When the aircraft is completed, it must bear the marking "Experimental" on the fuselage. "I have confidence in myself," Sanches said. "I have a responsibility to build it right because I can't just have it fall out of the sky. It's so over-built that it'll be a very safe aircraft. I haven't been flying since I retired, so I'll have to start flying again before I do the test flight. Certain requirements have to be met during the check-out period to make sure the aircraft is working properly before I can take anyone up in it. "I'll be flying it here and to Texas and hope to do some barnstorming with friends from Eastern and the Air Force." And what does his wife Joyce think about his passion? "She's been very gracious about it. We've been married forty-four years, but we joke that because I was a pilot for so long we've been together only twenty-two years. And soon I'll be off flying again." Fairview Forest Homeowners' Association   •   101 Fairview Forest Drive   •   Fairview, NC 28730