When Hugh Bikle opened Hugh’s Vintage Aircraft Museum more than
a decade ago, he wasn’t motivated by a desire to promote aviation
or to educate the public
– he just wanted people to stop bothering his mechanic.
When Hugh Bikle opened Hugh’s Vintage Aircraft Museum more than a decade ago, he wasn’t motivated by a desire to promote aviation or to educate the public – he just wanted people to stop bothering his mechanic.
Bikle said he’s been collecting vintage airplanes since the 1970s, and he moved them to their current hangar in the 1990s. Even before the museum opened, airport visitors would wander through and look at the planes.
“They’d interrupt the mechanic and say, ‘Is it OK to walk through?'” Bikle said. “So we thought it was better to just put up a sign.”
The hangar now houses five or six vintage planes at one time. Bikle said he keeps some of his planes at his ranch, and that he sometimes brings planes from other collections. Most of the planes were built during the first half of the 20th century.
The museum’s glider has a particularly strong connection to the Bikle family. It’s been in the family since the 1950s, and it was flown by Bikle’s father, Paul, when he broke the world altitude record for gliding in 1961, a record he held for more than 20 years.
With the exception of the glider, Bikle said he regularly flies every one of those vintage planes.
John Winchel, the museum’s mechanic, is the one who keeps those planes running. Winchel said he often spends seven days a week at the museum. He said it takes a lot of work to restore a plane. He pointed to six thick red binders in his office, which together comprised the instructions for restoring a single plane.
“You can spend all day to get one thing done,” he said. “Or maybe a couple of days.”
And once in a while, Bikle acknowledged, taking an old plane in the air can be a little dangerous. He recalled a particularly dicey episode flying a plane from Morgan Hill to Hollister. The engine kept shutting down in mid-air, but the fits and starts didn’t prevent Bikle from getting the plane home.
“If you restore them every 20, 30 years, these planes will literally last forever,” he said.
