Classic Kitty Hawk Bi-Plane To Grace The Skies Above Winnipesaukee This Summer

by Dan Seufert
Weirs Times Correspondent

This summer, Bob Coolbaugh will be flying north to New Hampshire, making his first trip from his hangar in New Market, Virginia, to Lake Winnipesaukee. But he’ll be flying a plane that is native to the lake – more specifically, to Paugus Bay.
Coolbaugh, a former U.S. Navy pilot who also had a long career flying huge jet airliners around the world, will be piloting a Model B-8 Kitty Hawk bi-plane that he calls the “Paugus Bay Kitty Hawk.”
In its third restoration, the craft was one of a handful of biplanes operating sea plane rides and larger trips in the early to mid 1900s, flying from Weirs Beach and Paugus Bay when pontooned sea plane rides carried an estimated 50,000 passengers around the lake during the heyday of Winnipesaukee air tourism, according to Jane Rice of Moultonborough, a local historian and the author of the book Bob Fogg and New Hampshire’s Golden Age of Aviation.

The biplanes of that era, which sat two passengers in front of the pilot seat, offered patrons an unusual view of the Big Lake, and were hugely popular among visitors. They were also hired by summer residents as far away as New York City as transportation to and from their Winnipesaukee vacation homes.
Coolbaugh, who bought the plane in 2012 and has been in the process of a $100,000 restoration operation since, is the only living pilot, he believes, with experience piloting a Kitty Hawk. Flying the plane, as he has done in tests, is unlike flying any other aircraft, he said.
“There are no more exhilarating thrills than the blast of air rushing past an open cockpit, the sound and smell of a powerful round engine banging away a few feet in front of you, the pull of eight feet of wooden propeller slicing the air,” Coolbaugh said.
“There are few rewards greater than the sense of moving grandly, if a bit slowly, for folks who can only vaguely understand the challenge and the joy of spending time aloft with this magnificent old gal.”
Coolbaugh said the Paugus Bay Kitty Hawk is the last flying craft of 34 originally built from 1929-34 by Bourdon Aircraft. It is a revised Kitty Hawk, the Viking Model B-8, with a 125 horsepower Kinner B-5 radial engine.
This plane was built in 1929 and was first used as a training plane by the College of William and Mary, of Williamsburg, Virginia, which had one of the first full ground and flight training programs in the United States.
The plane was later sold, and at the end of World War II, William Champlin and his mechanic, Bill Harmon, bought it and rebuilt the plane’s wings at Champlin’s Laconia Airport hangars, Coolbaugh said. They acquired a set of airplane floats and upgraded the engine to 160 horsepower for use over the lake.

After each summer season on the lake, the plane was hauled ashore, covered in tarps and bedded down for the winter. “As you might imagine, this took a pretty hard toll on the wooden wings and steel tubing in the fuselage, as well as to the dope covered cotton linen covering everything,” he said.
Harmon, who became an American Airlines pilot based out of Boston, purchased the plane and spent three years restoring it for a second time. But on the third flight after that restoration in July of 1974, the engine quit on Harmon over an open field in Laconia. It was too far from the lake for a water landing, so Harmon had to crash land it in a field near Parade Road. Harmon and his two passengers escaped uninjured.
Rice remembers when it crashed, as the field where it went down was next to her childhood home.
“He told my father he ran out of altitude, air speed and ideas all at the same time,” she said.
The plane was a ball of broken wings and bent metal after the crash, Coolbaugh said. Harmon took the plane apart and kept it in storage, always intending to restore it to flying condition some day. But 40 years later, he decided to sell the remains.

Coolbaugh, who had become an aircraft restoration hobbyist, was looking for a biplane restoration project. In 2012, he spent $25,000 on the plane and began the restoration. Since then he has replaced most of the plane’s parts, and he conducted the first successful test flights in 2018.
“Nearly every part and piece of the airplane had to be replaced or repaired. New wings, new tail, new landing gear, new instruments and radios, new upholstery, new fabric and dope covering, a newly overhauled Kinner R-56 engine and its accessories,” he said.
The plane was rolled out of the shop in sparkling newly painted colors and once again alive to fly in test runs in 2018.
“Thus far, the flight test program has been unusual and lengthy, in part because that kind of plane has become obscure with the passage of time,” he said. “It seems, after over 40 years forgotten in a storage shed, she is taking a bit of extra coaxing to get her back into the air. We fly a little, work a lot, fly some more.”

“Gradually she’ll take the bit again and we’ll be up and away as in her youthful days,” he said. “I plan to take it right into Paugus Bay, which will be my first trip there, this summer.”
Coolbaugh hasn’t set the day yet for the flight. But he plans to let local residents know when they can again spot the plane in the Lakes Region skies.
Rice said Coolbaugh and his plane will be welcome. “I can’t wait to see it,” she said.

Copies of Rice’s book can be obtained by writing to foggbook@gmail.com.