Bruce Campbell was so excited he could barely contain himself.
“Here,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet, “let me show you where I go to contemplate the universe.”
Thirty seconds later he’s waving gleefully from inside the round air intake on top of the fuselage of a Boeing 727. His own Boeing 727, he’s quick to note, the one he hauled high into the foothills of the Coast Range 25 miles southwest of Portland, Ore.
For now Campbell, 50, lives in a nearby trailer. But soon, perhaps by Christmas, the plane will become his home.
The only thing he sees as odd is why more people don’t do the same. Jetliners are among the best-made structures on Earth. After all, snow won’t collect on the roof and it can withstand 600 m.p.h. winds.
“Look,” he explained, “I’m a nerd in a square tin box. Soon I’ll be a nerd in a round tin box.”
Campbell, 50, waves, letting his legs dangle over the lip of the round opening where the tail section meets the fuselage. This is his refuge, 10 feet above the ground, where he goes to consider the quirky but invigorating world he’s building.
Two years ago, Campbell owned Hypatia Inc., a modest one-man company that makes testing and measurement devices. He was, by his own description, an unmarried high-tech nerd who knew little about jets.
But inspired by a report on NPR, he bought the Olympic Airways 727-200 from an airplane broker for $100,000. He figures he will spend another $110,000 to $120,000 on hauling, permits, setting it in place and furnishing it. Not a bad price really, considering the high cost of housing in Portland’s high-tech suburbs.
According to local real estate agents, the hills are scattered with rural mountain cabins that house longtime residents and newer estates, many selling for a half million dollars and more.
He expected the work to be slow going. What he didn’t expect, however, was the way the aircraft captured his imagination. He thought he was just getting a home. Instead the exploration and poetic beauty he found in a well-crafted piece of machinery have stirred his scientist’s heart.
“There’s a great reward, an existential joy in this engineering process,” he said. An electrical engineer by training, he speaks with awe about such mundane items as the bits of metal on the 31-year-old plane.
“There’s hardly a piece of metal you can find that’s flat,” he said, shaking his head in amazement. “They’ve all got a specific shape. It’s quite remarkable. Everything is very tight. As time has gone on, I’ve learned to respect that those aerospace engineers don’t just throw things together.”
Campbell has scrambled through every inch of the structure with the swift assurance of a child running through his neighborhood woods. He wriggles his way to places the average airline passenger never sees. He’s climbed through the narrow tunnel leading up through the tail section to the horizontal stabilizer, and he’s rooted through the insides of the flaps and the wing fuel tanks, some still spread on the ground.
Once he moves in it will be both his home and his office, a 1,066-square-foot bachelor pad, not counting the luggage compartment/basement.
He’s done little to the inside. He stripped away the floor, leaving the metal criss-crossing struts and exposing the luggage compartments below. Here is where he found a few of the 727’s secrets–Greek coins that fell into the walls from overhead compartments, mirrors under the cabin floor that pilots used to check whether the landing gear was down and a trap door under the carpet leading to service areas.
Eventually, he’ll cover the floor with acrylic and Plexiglas, giving it a translucent effect. All the seats are gone; some given to the Oregon Air National Guard and some sold to an East Coast theme restaurant.
The cockpit will become Campbell’s office, with computer screens–three, maybe five–set into the instrument panel. They’ll run avionics and navigation screen savers. He’s already hung a picture of HAL 9000, the computer that goes berserk in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Eventually, the main cabin will become a big studio apartment. He hopes to keep the kitchen and three bathrooms pretty much as they are, adding a shower and maybe a laundry room. “I’m a nerd,” he said. “I don’t need much preening time.”
Stumbling across the 727 in these woods is, to be sure, a little alarming at first. The trees provide nothing more than a fleeting, confused glance when driving up Campbell’s winding driveway. It must be some horrible crash. There’s no other explanation for finding a jet airplane stuck in the middle of the woods like this.
It sits today, wheels down, on wood-block pillars, one wing almost attached, the other still a stub. The ground beneath it slopes downward from the tail to the nose, giving it the illusion that it’s leaping into the air. Eventually it will look like a normal, operating jet, complete with antennas, weather gauges and perhaps even the thrust reversers. Engines and other parts were sold when Campbell first bought the plane.
He has lots of work left, such as reattaching the wings and getting the plane solidly anchored. It will sit on three concrete pillars, one for each wheel array. He envisions each pillar with a concave top to hold the wheels in place but allow wiggle room during an earthquake.
“I want a suspension system that’s balanced so it bounces back and rides it out,” he said. He also plans a sprinkler system in the surrounding woods, considering fire one of his greatest threats.
He’s become something of a curiosity around the Portland area. TV crews went live on the Sunday morning in February 1999 when he hauled the jet from the Hillsboro Airport to his 10-acre hilltop, a slow trip of about seven miles.
The plane also has attracted aviation buffs, and some of them provided valuable technical help. Jim Freeman of nearby Aloha, for example, was working for Boeing on the 727 assembly line in Renton, Wash., in 1969 and probably helped attach the wings to Campbell’s plane. He’s now an adviser to the project.
This is, he concedes, a very un-nerd-like operation. He remains pretty sure that his nerd credentials remain intact.
“I’ve spent most of my life hunched over a soldering iron or terminal,” he said. “I’m 50, socially inept, skinny, easily intimidated physically and never married. But I’ve made some progress. I used to be a geek.”
He relishes talking about the project and taking visitors–he’s had many–on tours. He writes regularly of his discoveries on his Web site: www.airplanehome.com. But it has become a far bigger and more engrossing project than he originally thought.
“It’s a little like a home mortgage,” he said. “You can’t envision the whole thing. It’s too overwhelming. But for a technology nerd like me, it’s a great toy.”
BROKER BETS SALES TAKE OFF
Ready to run out and buy your own 727? No problem. A Smyrna, Tenn., company is ready to help.
Max Power Aerospace, buyer and broker of used jets and their parts, began a sideline of rigging Boeing 727s as homes, which includes hooking up power, water, sewer and other utilities while making sure everything meets local building codes.
The 727s are an aging fleet and Thomas Bennington, founder of Max Power Aerospace, thinks maybe they’re better off on the ground than in the air. The company’s first such conversion is slated to become a Georgia restaurant.
Bennington, a former pilot for Eastern Airlines, formed the company in 1998. Like Bruce Campbell in Hillsboro, Ore., Bennington became enchanted by the planes and wanted a way to preserve them.
The company envisions a home that can be put up anywhere, on a hill, in the woods or even over water with little disruption to the terrain, said Mike McFall, vice president for administration and finance.
They suggest mounting the plane on a central column and letting it pivot in the wind. These planes, McCall points out, are a little heavier than weathervanes.
“Once the people see the first one up on the oceanfront, there’s an unlimited market,” McCall said. “People will realize it’s a safe house. It’s not going to be blown down in a storm. There’s not much going on like it. Not in suburbia. It’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”
Maybe the 727’s 1,066 square feet are not enough for you. Those bathrooms just too much of a squeeze? Well, how about a 747–4,000 square feet downstairs and another 800 in the penthouse.
The cost? Depends on several factors, including the terrain, how long a trip to get to the site and local zoning rules.
“Some places all they want to know is if you have a septic tank,” McCall said. “Other places, you have to redesign the whole plane.”
A 747, to be sure, would cost a whole lot more. A 727 is hard enough to ferry down your average suburban street. A 747 would be a far greater and far more expensive undertaking. So figure more than the $300,000 for a furnished and delivered Boeing 727. You provide the land.
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For more information, contact Max Power Aerospace at 615-223-5600 or at www.maxpoweraero.com
