Pair flying high with rebuilding outfit

 Peter Gross used to build race cars for Unsers, Andrettis, A.J. Foyt and the first woman to compete in the Indianapolis 500, Janet Guthrie.

Now he rebuilds old airplanes.

“The technologies are similar,” Gross says. “One just flies closer to the ground.”

As long as he’s building — or rebuilding — things with his own two hands, the 61-year-old Gross is a happy man. He opened Kalispell Air Repair in 2008 and has watched it take off in a recession.

Right now, for instance, while Ken Good and Dennis Lacy hold down the home front at Kalispell City Airport, Gross leads a team of 15 aircraft mechanics hired by Kalispell Air Repair to complete a contract the company has to work on retardant planes for Neptune Aviation Services in Missoula.

That’s 15 previously out-of-work aircraft mechanics from Montana. Creating that many jobs for local people in this economy — even if it’s just through the spring as Neptune readies its fleet for the coming wildfire season — is something Gross says both he and Neptune are proud of.

But it’s back here in Kalispell that the young business tends to its year-round work of refurbishing mostly private aircraft.

Gross suggests that he wasn’t sure if his business model would fly until Good walked through the door one day.

A farm equipment mechanic in Idaho, Good fulfilled a longtime dream in 2005 and moved to Alaska.

There, he retrained in Fairbanks and became a federally licensed airframe and power plant mechanic, as is Gross.

But he and his wife returned to the Lower 48, this time to the Kalispell area where she has family, and Good set about looking for work in his new field.

Gross didn’t have any to immediately offer — Kalispell Air Repair was an idea that had not yet been born — but between the two of them, Gross saw a way to make it happen.

Gross, you see, is a fabricator.

Good works with fabric.

“My side of the equation was sheet metal and the mechanical side,” Gross says. “What Ken does — re-covering fabric-covered planes — is kind of a dying art.”

A lot of airplanes, especially older ones, have both — sheet metal cowlings, flaps and rudders, for instance, and fabric-covered bodies and wings.

“There aren’t a lot of companies that can do complete refurbishing,” Gross says. “You certainly don’t find one at every airport.”

Kalispell Air Repair’s success has allowed Gross — who earned his pilot’s license as a teenager in Indiana more than 40 years ago — to use the company to promote flying in general (which he figures is just good for business) and floatplanes specifically (which he loves).

“Unfortunately, many pilots are reaching an age where they’re dropping out,” Gross says. “We’re trying to create an interest in aviation.”

When he was a kid, Gross says, you could walk onto small airports, touch planes and dream of flying them one day.

“I washed planes as a kid to earn the money to learn how to fly,” Gross says. “Now all the airports have to be fenced and you can’t get on them.”

The mystique of flying isn’t what it used to be either, Gross says, perhaps because air travel is much more common than it once was.

But squishing into Seat 32E on a commercial jetliner, going from Point A to Point B and comparing it to flying, Gross says, “is like sitting in the back of a Greyhound bus and comparing it to being behind the wheel of a sports car.”

“You’ll never experience at 30,000 feet in an airliner,” he goes on, “what you will in a floatplane that’s 500 feet off the water, where you can plop down on a lake, get out your fishing pole, cast your line and catch a trout.”

And so Kalispell Air Repair has a floatplane base just a few miles down the road, at the north end of Flathead Lake. There’s an airstrip where planes can land, pontoons can be attached and a ramp where the aircraft can be launched into the lake like you would a boat.

“I’d like the base to provide an aviation destination for pilots,” Gross says — pilots who could fly in from around the United States for a few days and bring their families.

While the family enjoyed the Flathead Valley and Glacier National Park, the pilots could have their planes outfitted with pontoons, and get their seaplane training and endorsement.

“A lot of pilots have it on their bucket list, as one of the things they want to do,” he says.

Not far from the bright, neat-as-a-pin hangar that is home to Kalispell Air Repair is another.

It’s cluttered, and the white plane in the middle is gathering dust.

“This hangar gets the stuff we’d rather be working on,” Gross admits.

The white one is Gross’s personal plane. Business has been so busy he hasn’t had time to fiddle with, or fly it, lately — although he promises that will change as summer approaches.

The plane is a Stinson that Gross has modified so much and so often, it’s now officially an experimental aircraft that he calls a “Stetson.”

Over the years he’s made the wings 25 percent longer, built his own instrument panel from scratch, installed a sunroof, replaced the doors with ones hinged at the top to make it easier to step out onto pontoons, and created a cavernous baggage compartment so large it not only holds plenty of camping gear, but there’s enough room that he, wife Colette and their dogs can sleep in it if they touch down on a lake and the weather turns bad.

A Gross-built race car never won the Indy 500 during his days doing that, but there were plenty of solid finishes.

“I’ve come in third, I’ve come in second, I’ve come close,” he says, and he did put together the car P.J. Jones, son of racing legend Parnelli Jones, used to win the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1993.

When actor Paul Newman followed his passion for racing into competing in the sport, Gross was the man he called to build his car.

The biggest similarity between working on race cars and planes, Gross says, is that “One hundred percent, all the time, it always has to be in your mind that someone’s life is in your hands. I suppose a lot of people can say that — if an electrician doesn’t do his job right, he can burn your house down — but it’s a little more in-your-face when you see someone climb in a plane you’ve worked on, start the engine and fly away.”

Still, he’d never trade it.

“My wife accuses me of going to play every day, and it’s true,” Gross says. “I love to build, I love to fabricate, even more than I love to fly. I get paid to do what I’d do for free, and Ken’s the same way. For both of us, this is a labor of love.”