Blake Deal’s straight 500 isn’t the oldest Twin Commander flying, but it might be one of the nicest. Deal’s 1959 Model 500 recently won the prestigious Lindy Award in the category of Most Unique at EAA AirVenture, and with its distinctive original paint and modern interior and panel, it’s easy to see why.
Deal and his friend Luch Scremin purchased the airplane in 1998 and immediately set off restoring it. An aerial applicator in the Pacific Northwest had used the airplane like a pickup truck, shuttling people and parts between outlying fields, and it was showing its age. With a new house being built on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, Deal was looking for an airplane that had long legs and could carry people and gear from his home in Jacksonville, Florida. “I had a Seneca then but I wanted to haul stuff,” he said.
When they bought the airplane, it had its original Lear autopilot, ratty shag carpeting and the engine mounts were corroded. They pulled the engines and had them overhauled, reskinned the vertical and horizontal stabilizer, repainted it and put in a new leather interior and modern avionics.
From there Deal flew N159K around 100 hours a year, mostly to his place in the Bahamas and his farm in the Virginia mountains. This summer he made a bucket-list trip to Alaska and back, flying more than 8,700 nautical miles over the course of two weeks with his best friend and their wives. Deal said he had always wanted to circle one of the most remote places in the United States – Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. Only 2.5 miles west is Big Diomede Island, which belongs to Russia. Big Diomede is on the other side of the international dateline, making the time 21 hours later. Another 25 miles west is the Siberian mainland. “Our wingtip was probably a half-mile from Russia,” he said. “I can say I’ve flown her as far west as you can go, and just another half-mile west I could say, I had flown her as far east as you can go.”
The four travelers easily fit all their bags and survival gear to make the long trip from Florida, despite COVID restrictions.
They were able to completely overfly the Canada Rockies and go from Southeast Alaska to Idaho, which meant there was no need to clear Customs or deal with the hassles that a landing in Canada would have meant. The only trouble on the entire trip was a bad screen on the Aspen Avionics primary flight display. Overnight shipping and a quick swap by Northern Lights Avionics at Merrill Field in Anchorage meant no time was lost.
Deal is no stranger to long trips in the airplane. Although his milk runs are to Virginia and the Bahamas, the family has flown the Commander out West to go skiing and to Lake Powell. In 2015 Deal took his kids on the “typical RV tour’ of the US, visiting Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Catalina Island, San Francisco, the Redwood Forest, Yellowstone, Cody, Wyoming and Pikes Peak. He has also flown over a dozen mission trips back and forth to Haiti from Florida, typically launching from Tamiami Airport new Miami and flying nonstop to Port Au Prince.
It was one of the Lake Powell trips in 2019 that prompted the second restoration.
On the flight back a valve on the right engine started sticking and Deal decided to divert to Wiley Post Airport in Oklahoma City. A few former Commander employees heard an older 500 was in the area and came by to show him the hangar where his airplane was made and painted. He also met the folks from Associated Aero Tech Service and Blakney Aviation, who helped get the airplane an annual inspection and the engine overhauled (it was near TBO) at Barrett Precision Engines in Tulsa. But it was the $72,000 worth of sheet metal work that really brought the airplane back to life. “It’s rare that you find sheet metal craftsmen like the folks at Associated Aero, so I had to take advantage of that opportunity to get the sheet metal back to like-new condition,” Deal said.
Then it was a matter of choosing the right paint scheme. Deal had seen an advertisement from the 1950s of his model with a factory scheme he really liked. Geoffrey Pence from Twin Commander Aircraft was able to help figure out that the scheme was unusual in that it was a combination of two 1959 paint options – one on the fuselage and another on the tail. Pence provided the paint shop with the original paint layout drawings and Ricky Henderson at Wiley Post coordinated with Sherwin Williams to match the colors in Jet Glo.
The job was topped with three-point harnesses, AmSafe airbag seatbelts, and engraved buckles from Aircraft Belts, Inc. for the passenger seats. Soon after he added a Sofie Air Conditioning form Peter Schiff Aero. Later this fall, he’s going to modernize the panel even more with the Genesys 3100 autopilot with electric trim and a flight director, and add a second Aspen screen.
Owning an older aircraft, especially a complex, transportation-use model, usually requires a special person. Someone who is willing to spend the time and energy to track down the occasional part that no longer is manufactured and may be sourced from the back of a hangar. “Over the years Jim Schiller in Lantana, Florida and Morris Kernick in Stockton, California, have been angels in helping me,” he said. Deal says that he loves the bulletproof 0540 Lycoming engines that power N159K. Although, he certainly understands how Shrike owners love the sleek look of their birds, he loves the classic lines on the earlier Commanders. “When people who don’t know airplanes ask me what kind of a plane I have, I tell them it looks like a miniature WWII bomber,” he said.
Buying and restoring a 1959 airplane would scare a lot of people, but Deal has a lot of experience in general aviation. He owned and operated a part 135 charter company and flight school, and has flown and owned over 24 different aircraft models, including everything from his first Cessna 150K to Cessna 414s, Merlins, Aerostars, a Saberliner 60 and Citation V. It’s not that owning an antique aircraft is his passion. He just loves what the 500 can do. He’s looked at and considered a turbine-powered Twin Commander but he always comes back to his 500. “I love having the ability if I want to cruise along at 1,000 feet above the ground and look at stuff,” he said. “Or I can go to 10,000 or 12,000 feet if I need to. And you just can’t beat the operating cost of a straight 500.” He said a turbine is meant for going somewhere and doing it up high. “The 8,700 miles to Alaska I was looking out the window the whole time. We saw the Appalachians turn into the plains and then the Badlands, flew at 500 feet over the peaks of the Rockies, and just above the water all the way up the inland passage from Seattle to Ketchikan. In all my years of flying my 500 Commander, I’ve gotten to see so many things that you’d never see any other way than being in your own reliable twin-engine aircraft.”
And he has no interest in an airplane from another manufacturer. He jokes that he goes to Oshkosh and asks the sales reps where people put their bags. He has room for seven people with bags, payload for almost six hours of fuel, cruises at 165 knots, and he can get in and out of 1,600-foot strips. It’s a combination that’s hard to beat, even 60-plus years later.
