this is pretty cool, a rare old plane has been restored in time to celebrate the 100th year anniversary of it's first flight Thanks Bill!

100 years ago, from 1914 to 1919, Ithaca  New York had two industries, making movies, and making airplanes, the Thomas Morse, or Tommy as everyone calls it.

Incidentally, the man who designed the Tommy, also drew up the Jenny when he was at Curtiss. In addition to having worked for Curtiss, B. Douglas Thomas was also a British expat, and before coming to the U.S. had sharpened his pencil at Vickers Ltd. and Sopwith. That's why it looks so familiar.

Those intersected when a movie was made about a WW1 flying ace's exploits in the French Air Service squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille.

and for the past decade, the people of Ithaca have been donating time and money to restore just one, because when they got together to plan an "Airport Day" the subject of the locally made Thomas Morse came up, and they learned only 15 exist around the world.

That's mighty scarce... and they made up their minds that one needed to be in it's home town, so they set about to restore one.  The project’s leader, Don Funke said, “A big issue for us,” he said, “is that you can’t buy one of these. A collector or museum—if they had one—either wanted a lot of money or a trade. We had no money. We had no trade.”

Then, in 2010, “divine providence,” as Funke tells it, intervened. The Tommy team learned that Dr. Thibault of Newport Beach, California, happened to own a vintage Tommy, and his son lived in Ithaca.

The doctor and his wife visited the town regularly and quickly a gentle, coordinated campaign of persuasion got under way and succeeded. Thanks to the Thibaults’ generosity, the Scout bearing production number 191 came home. Thibault told the Tommy volunteers, “You demonstrated you would do exactly what I had always wanted to do with the plane, which was to restore the aircraft to its original configuration.”

Another was known to exist at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in Rhinebeck, New York. Although it was on display the Rhinebeck staff allowed the Tommy team to examine, measure, and photograph their Scout for reference on how to properly restore the 191, which had been cobbled together with parts scavenged from other models, including the cowl and lower wings of a Scout prototype disguised as a “French” aircraft in the movie I mentioned "A Romance of the Air".

The volunteers in the Tommy project were lucky to get to use the original tools at the same facility where the Scout was produced, to replicate a complete set of upper and lower wings at the location. It was, as Funke said, “a rare privilege to be handling the same tools in the same place where those parts were first produced a century ago.

and this Saturday, a Tommy will fly again.

"If we were going to build a museum piece, we could have been done two years later and it would have looked really really nice - to look at it from here, you'd say 'Oh that's not a great big difference, that's pretty...' But it didn't fly! And I like to say, you know, what makes an airplane an airplane? It flies!" Funke says.

 And this S4-B Tommy will do just that come this weekend.

 The Ithaca Aviation Heritage Foundation will celebrate the plane's long journey home for Tommy's Centennial Flight!

 "To see an airplane after 100 years leave the ground for the first time on it's own, that's an experience...and one that we look forward to," says Funke.

 Tommy's Homecoming will take place on Saturday, September 29th from 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. at the Ithaca-Tompkins Regional Airport. The event is free and open for the public to attend!

  https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/13_sep2018-ithacas-airplane-180969918/
https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2018/07/27/tommys-place-a-1917-thomas-morse-s-4b-is-restored-where-it-was-built/
http://www.tommycomehome.org
https://www.facebook.com/tommycomeshome/
http://www.weny.com/story/39163939/restored-wwi-plane-with-local-ties-to-fly-again
https://www.facebook.com/pg/tommycomeshome/photos/