Plane Truth About Airlooms : Aviation: The maintenance costs of Anaheim executive’s collection of vintage aircraft are putting him in the red.

A telling word pops up every now and then when you have a long conversation with the man who owns his own air force. It just happens once in a while, in between talk of overhauled propellers and leaky radiators and unexpected belly landings and slim air show profits and titanic maintenance bills and how much gas it takes just to kick over the four engines in a B-17. But it tells you everything you need to know.

Frankenstein.

It’s barely even an analogy, so close are the parallels: A driven and passionate man engineers a creation that no one had dared dream of before, a project both magnificent and awesome. He succeeds wildly.

And then his creation rises up to smite him.

David Tallichet can only shake his head. All around him in a dim hangar at Chino Airport are the fruits of his labor, his magnificent mechanical children: a gull-wing Corsair fighter, a perfect Piper L-5, a stripped-down Douglas Skyraider, a needle-bright and airworthy British Spitfire, a breathtaking P-38 Lightning with a pair of zero-time engines, knife-like reconditioned propellers and not a single paint chip.

And in other hangars, on other Tarmac ramps, at other tie-downs throughout the United States and the world there are more--vintage bombers, sleek fighters, World War II-era aircraft of every kind and in all states of airworthiness or repair. So many of them--one estimate puts the collection at around 120 flyable and not flyable aircraft--that even Tallichet has trouble keeping mental track.

He loves them all. And, if they can fly, he has flown them. He has coaxed them, burnished them, rejoiced in them, traveled the world for them, fought for them, even crashed in them.

And now they are doing their best to bankrupt him.

The overseer of what is by all accounts the largest private collection of aircraft in the world, Tallichet is a unique personality in aviation circles. The president and chief executive officer of Specialty Restaurants Inc., an Anaheim-based company that operates restaurants throughout the country, the 70-year-old Tallichet is a master horse trader and highly rated pilot who, paradoxically, claims to have both limited business sense and a broad ignorance of aircraft mechanics.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “And I’m not mechanically minded and I don’t even have the curiosity to become that way, so I kind of turn my back to the mechanical part of it. We’ve got an awful lot of mechanics hired and it just takes an awful lot of money to try to make a plane fly today. It’s just out of this world. Airplanes like this are going up in value so much because the price of parts is escalating unbelievably.

“Really, the best advice I’ve ever heard is that if you buy an airplane, stick it in the hangar and don’t spend any money on it and let inflation and scarcity take the price up. If I’d been smart, I maybe would have had two or three prime ones in perfect shape and put everything else in a hangar someplace and just let time go by.”

Instead--for both better and worse--he became an airborne Dr. Frankenstein.

It all began fairly modestly, almost on a whim. A visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s, along with some encouragement from another collector, is what lit the fire under the then-fledgling businessman.

“I left Washington excited,” said Tallichet. “I got addicted to it. When I decide to do things, I get enthused and I do them with vigor. I said, ‘By God, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to collect airplanes.’ ”

He had the means to do it, and the flying background. He flew 21 missions over occupied Europe in early 1945 as the co-pilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber. After the war he remained on active Air Force reserve status until 1957, flying a variety of aircraft.

Then, in 1958, after a dissatisfying stint as a supply officer, he went on inactive status and opened his first restaurant, the Reef in Long Beach. It was to be the first of a nationwide chain.

As the money came in from the successful restaurant business, Tallichet and his partner at the time bought a pair of vintage planes, a Stearman and a T-34. Shortly after, Tallichet bought his first P-51 Mustang fighter for $13,000. Today, he said, he still has the restored P-51, which now may be worth $500,000.

As the restaurant business allowed, Tallichet began to horse trade, buying and swapping for World War II-era planes and parts throughout the world. To accommodate the traffic, he created the Chino-based Military Aircraft Restoration Corp. (MARC), a wholly owned subsidiary of Specialty Restaurants.

In those early days, said Tallichet, it was almost a lark. “I had all this money coming in and I’d been a poor boy all my life,” he said. “In relation to today, the planes were quite cheap and business was good and I made quite a few trips.”

He traveled to places such as India, New Guinea and the Yukon Territory of Canada to check out good buys on rare planes, or even rare parts of planes. According to MARC’s general manager Joe Prieto, Tallichet even arranged an expedition to the Canadian Rockies to haul out the makings of one of the centerpieces of his current collection, a short-wing B-26 Martin Marauder.

“We have the only one of those planes flying now,” Prieto said. “Three of them crashed in the Canadian Rockies years ago--ran out of gas. And (Tallichet) brought them out of the mountains on donkeys.”

Tallichet has flown almost all of the better-known American-made military aircraft of World War II vintage--from P-40 Tomahawk fighters to the giant B-29 Superfortress.

As magnificent as the planes are, however, they cannot seem to turn a profit. In fact, said Tallichet, MARC has been in the black at the end of only one year of its operation: 1989, the year Tallichet’s B-17 flew the title role in the film “Memphis Belle.”

Tallichet lists three factors that have caused his business to slip, and he starts with himself.

“I’m the president of the company,” he said, “and 95% of our business is restaurants and I start screwing around and flying airplanes and I really don’t do right by the company. So I end up losing more money by not operating the company right than I might make in the airplane business.”

Spotty aircraft maintenance also has increased the red ink, he said. Broken airplanes cannot fly, and aviation enthusiasts don’t want to pay to see a plane that doesn’t move. And a less-than-fully airworthy B-17, for instance, runs the risk of grounding by the Federal Aviation Administration, as was MARCs Flying Fortress recently. On the ground, a plane that exotic is an automatic cash drain.

And then there’s the radiator fiasco. To bring his latest P-38 into pristine condition, Tallichet bought four radiators for a total of $28,000. They sat on a shelf for a year and during that time not only did the guarantee on the radiators run out, but also coolant leaked out, they dried out and as a result had to be repaired to the tune of another $19,000 before they could be installed--in an airplane for which Tallichet originally paid $23,000.

So, said Tallichet, the time has come to put his corporate feet more firmly on the ground.

“I got way in debt about five years ago and (the debt) now is about half of what it was then,” he said. “But it’s still about twice what it should be. The sensible thing to do is to get out of debt, don’t try to be the biggest (collector), try to do what maybe Hitler didn’t do or what Napoleon may have done, and that’s to have a slow, strategic retreat so you don’t leave materiel squandered on the battlefield. By that, I mean that I want to slowly sell my airplanes at a good retail price.”

But not all of them.

“I’d like to keep the fighter collection, all the single-engine airplanes, maybe one B-17 and one B-25 and get rid of all the other multi-engine airplanes,” he said.

This may be enough to make other collectors, museums and enthusiasts with money around the world rub their hands together. The market, however, is limited. Tallichet said he has talked with a Texas collector who owns an aviation museum, and knows of a handful of others who may have the ready cash--or the financing--to buy up the huge relics. Even the Imperial War Museum in London is on Tallichet’s list as a possible buyer of the Martin Marauder and an extremely rare airworthy B-24 Liberator bomber. Tallichet is ready to deal.

“I’m asking pretty good prices if anybody’s willing to pay those prices,” he said. “It’s been fun. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m just upset things got away from me.”