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Oldest active plane heads to museum

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. - The oldest active airplane used by the U.S. Air Force flew off into retirement Friday, but not before its first pilot gave some advice to its last.

It was the same thing Nello Infanti told every crew over the years that he flew Calspan Corp.'s Total In-Flight Simulator, beginning 40 years ago.

"Be careful up there, don't get lost," the former chief test pilot, now 87, said. "And don't ding my eff-ing airplane."

"Don't forget what I told you," Infanti reminded pilot Paul Deppe as he walked to "TIFS" to prepare for takeoff to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

In its noteworthy career as an in-flight simulator, the modified C-131 has been flown by NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Deke Slayton, along with Air Force and civilian pilots, during the development of the space shuttle, military bombers and commercial aircraft.

The one-of-a-kind airplane has two cockpits, one piggybacked on the other, allowing test pilots to fly from the front cockpit during simulations while safety pilots manned the top cockpit and plane's regular controls, ready to take over if something went wrong.

Program engineers stationed inside the airplane used computers to change conditions and collect data.

"We would be able to make this airplane handle like a totally different airplane," said John Babala, a program engineer on board for the final flight.

The evaluation cockpit could be reconfigured to model whatever aircraft was being simulated.

"We duplicate the motions, the controls, displays," said Norm Weingarten, TIFS program manager. "We're really coming all the way down to touchdown."

TIFS is the only airborne simulator able to reproduce pitch, roll, lift, thrust and lateral movements, as well as sideforce _ a trait the smaller and more fuel-efficient Learjets used for in-flight simulations today cannot match.

"It's still very useful, but we have been getting a research program about once every two years and it's just tough to keep it going that way," said Lou Knotts, president of Calspan, a technology company originally founded as part of the research laboratory of the Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division in Buffalo.

There were plenty of military and civilian aircraft under design in the 1960s, '70s and '80s to keep TIFS busy, but not many new aircraft are developed today, he said, and the company needs space in its Niagara Falls hangar for future projects.

TIFS was last called into service this past spring to simulate the Nov. 12, 2001, flight of American Airlines 587 before it lost part of its tail and plummeted into a New York City neighborhood, killing 265 people. The findings, which Knotts could not discuss, are part of ongoing litigation.

Before that, Boeing used TIFS in the development of its new 787 jetliner.

"It's a sad day, really," Infanti, who was chief test pilot at Calspan from 1969 until 1983, said as TIFS was towed from its hangar for a final takeoff, "because I would say this is the most sophisticated in-flight simulator ever built."