Rescuing a 1935 Waco YOC-1

I first met Mike White last September at the annual Triple Tree fly-in. At that time, he was flying a Stinson 108-3. A couple of months later, he contacted me and said, “I just bought an airplane that might make for an interesting article. It’s a 1935 Waco YOC-1. Are you interested?” I must be honest. I would not be able to tell one model of Waco from another. Then he sent me a picture of his new steed—and yes, I was interested. Fast-forward about six months—and Mike and I finally had a chance to meet at the Carolinas Virginia Vintage Airplane Foundation fly-in in Camden, South Carolina, which ran from April 30 to May 3.

What is a Waco?

According to Wikipedia, “The Waco Aircraft Company (WACO) was an aircraft manufacturer located in Troy, Ohio, United States. Between 1920 and 1947, the company produced a wide range of civilian biplanes. The company initially started under the name Weaver Aircraft Company of Ohio but changed its name to the Waco Aircraft Company in 1928/29. Several companies operated under the Waco name, with the first company being the Weaver Aircraft Company, a firm founded by George E. Weaver, Clayton Bruckner, and Elwood Junkin in 1920 in Lorain and Medina, Ohio, after they had already been collaborating for several years. In the spring of 1923 this became the Advance Aircraft Company in Troy, Ohio, after the departure of Weaver. In 1929, it was changed from Advance Aircraft Company to Waco Aircraft Company. The Waco Custom Cabins were a series of up-market single-engined four- to five-seat cabin sesquiplanes of the late 1930s produced by the Waco Aircraft Company of the United States. ‘Custom Cabin’ was Waco’s own description of the aircraft.”

Before going further, let’s tackle the “Waco Alphabet Soup.” White explains, “Waco certainly had a unique system of designating its aircraft. The first letter lists the engine used, the second reflects the wing design, and the third describes the cabin type. The coding system was changed in 1929 with several letters reassigned, and later with the introduction of the Custom Cabin series, the third letter ‘C’ was initially replaced with C-S (Cabin-Standard) and finally S. The numeral suffix represents the first year of production if it is 6 or higher (6=1936), or a subtype if 2 or less. If you are not already confused, keep on reading.”

Mike White’s YOC-1 is registered N15216, MSN 4300. He explains, “My plane was built as a CUC, constructed with a 285-hp (213 kW) Wright R-760-E1 engine. However, in 1956, the airplane was rebuilt with a Jacobs engine installed, thus resulting in a designation to a YOC-1. (As of this writing, I have not found an explanation for why or how the middle ‘U’ was changed to an ‘O,’ so if anyone has an explanation, please share it with us). The Waco is now powered by a 275-hp (209 kW) Jacobs R-755B2.”

Mike White’s fascination with aviation began when he was a small child. He recalls, “My childhood home in northern Connecticut was underneath the traffic pattern of a small runway. When I was 6 years old, I learned how to ride a bicycle and I became that kid at the airport fence on the weekends, and after school in the summertime. By the time I was eight or nine, I answered the phone at the FBO, answering the Unicom for pilots coming into the pattern, running the fuel pump, sweeping out hangars, and washing cars and airplanes, for airplane rides. As I got older, other things became more important. Sports, friends, and girls took a lot of my time and energy, and my airport activities subsided. I never lost my passion for airplanes, but as I got older, I stopped going to the airport.”

Then came college. Mike says he was a 20-year-old student who was lost and did not know what he wanted. Finally, his father said, “Hey, what about aviation?” And that rekindled that fire in Mike, and he found himself at a Part 141 school training, earned his CFI, and began instructing in 2001. He continues, “Six months into my new career, 9/11 occurred and my flight school in the Northeast went out of business. By then, my parents had moved from Connecticut to Hawaii, so I followed them out there looking for work. I found a job flight instructing in Honolulu, and after a few months of flight instructing, I networked my way into the right seat of a Beech 18 for a cargo company called Kamaka Air. I would show up at 4:30 a.m., load 3,500 pounds of fresh-caught fish, and fly out of the island resorts. Within six months, I was in the left seat of the Twin Beech, flying for Kamaka Air in the mornings and flight instructing in the afternoons and evenings. That led me to my first airline job in 2004 for Great Lakes Airlines in Denver.”

Mike White’s career with Great Lakes was one of the shortest in airline history, as he laments, “I got furloughed from Great Lakes right out of training. I never even touched the airplane! I ended up flying a Swearingen Metroliner for a cargo company in Denver called Key Lime Air. I spent about 3 1/2 years flying the Metroliner before landing a job in the right seat of Kalitta, flying 747s in 2007. That was one heck of a jump from a Metroliner into a 747 Classic!” That job went very well until the economy crashed late in 2008. Kalitta lost a lot of business because freight stopped moving out of China when the U.S. economy crashed and in 2009, White was again furloughed. Out of that furlough, he ended up at a regional airline called Trans States, flying Embraer 145s.

Finally, White was hired by Atlas Air in 2016, and five years later, he checked out as a captain on the 747, based in New York. Mike and his wife, Sasha, moved to Chesapeake, Virginia, near where she was born and raised. He says, “We built a house there and went into a partnership on a Piper Apache, an airplane I used to instruct on in Honolulu. I had a lot of Apache time and loved the airplane, but the partnership did not go very well, and we ended up getting out of it. Instead, in 2017, we got into our first airplane that was all our own, a 1948 Stinson 108-3. We had the Stinson for about eight years, until we acquired the Waco in November 2025. Meanwhile, in July 2023, we bought a second airplane, a Glasair Super II RG, so now, we have a ‘luxury plane’ for going slow and a ‘speedster’ when we need to go somewhere quickly.”

Back to the Waco. White recalls, “We bought the Stinson in 2017. Exactly 48 hours after we bought it, Sasha and I loaded it up with all our camping gear and flew to this place we’d never been before called Triple Tree, South Carolina (SC00). We parked over in the side field and set up our camp, and we spent the week there. On either the very first or second day that we were there, we were making trips over towards the bathhouse, back and forth to our airplane. We soon stumbled on a group of folks over in a section called Wilsonville, named for Jim Wilson, a legend in the vintage aircraft world. There, we met Jim and his wife, Eileen. We had our little dog with us at the time, and Sasha was carrying her in this little papoose thing. Jim made some comments about what is that? We went over and, before long, we became fast friends with the group of folks at Wilsonville. When we went back in 2018, we parked in about the same spot in that field. Jim immediately asked, ‘What are you doing over there? You need to be over here. Move that airplane over here.'”

Mike and Sasha have been camping with the Wilsons at Triple Tree every year since. He notes, “Jim has had this Waco, a YKS-6, for as long as we’ve known him, and really, for the longest time, I did not think anything of it. I always thought they were beautiful airplanes but never even really considered one or wanting one. But the more time I spent with these folks, I started to understand the world of antiques and ended up getting involved with this group heavily over the last several years. As I started to network with these folks and getting to know them and learn about these airplanes, the more intrigued both Sasha and I both became. Then we got to sit in one at Triple Tree that we really liked, a Custom Cabin. I finally got to ride in Jim’s.”

According to Mike, “We took the Glasair up to First Ditch in Minnesota with the Marginal folks a couple years ago. At that fly-in, they park all the Wacos in a row, and there were a lot of Waco folks up there. That is when we started to get the bug that we wanted something better, faster, and roomier. Fast-forward to last July. We were flying the Stinson home from the barnstorming carnival in Ohio when we had an engine failure. We were able to land successfully at London-Corbin, Kentucky. The folks there took wonderful care of us. We were able to rent a car to continue the journey home and put the Stinson in a T-hangar out of the weather. A few days later, I flew back up there in the Glasair with a mechanic friend of mine. I had a spare Franklin engine in my hangar, and we brought all the parts and tools we needed to do a cylinder change on the Franklin engine. We found the fatal flaw, which was easily repairable. We fixed it, ran it up, signed it off, flew it home … and put it up for sale. The Stinson sat on the market for about two months, but we did sell it, and we got serious about looking for a Waco. We knew that we wanted a Waco, and we reached out to Vaughn Lovely—he knows of every Waco in the world. If there is one for sale, he’s the guy. I called Vaughn and told him we were looking for a Waco, and he rattled off three or four that were either for sale or were coming up for sale. The one we were interested in was in the New England Air Museum in Connecticut, ironically only a few miles from where I grew up. It was a beautiful cabin Waco that had been in the museum for 20 years, and they were looking to move it off their inventory.”

White got Vaughn to broker a deal for this airplane and on a layover for the airline in New York, he rented a car and drove up there and went to the airplane. “I sat in it, made airplane noises, and took a million pictures. I told Jim Wilson all about it and, Jim being Jim, he looked up all the logs on the FAA website, carefully read through them, and announced, ‘This is a good airplane. We need to get this airplane.’ Jim agreed to help Mike in any way he could to rescue this airplane from the museum. Mike bought a battery, tires, oil and fuel lines, fittings, and everything Jim thought they might need to get this airplane running, receive an annual inspection, and get out of there.”

Jim and his wife Eileen even agreed to load up his car and drive to Connecticut from South Carolina and meet Mike at the museum to get this airplane “woken up” and ready to fly home. He had even arranged for an IA to come up and sign off an annual inspection on the airplane. Mike notes, “I am not an A&P, but a neighbor of mine showed a lot of interest in the airplane just because it was so unique. In fact, he told me if this were a 182, he would never have said yes to this. But because it was a Waco, he would come up and do this. So, I made hotel reservations for Jim and Eileen and my friend, the IA, and myself, and we were only three days from driving up to Connecticut to rescue the airplane when the museum backed out of the deal! Somebody on the board was not happy about how things were done, even though they voted to let the airplane go. In any event, they reneged on the deal and, because we didn’t have anything in writing, we were stuck. That airplane is still being held hostage—dying in a museum—and we were back to square one on airplanes.”

White then remembered seeing a YOC for sale online from several months prior, but the ad was gone. So being a member of the National Waco Club, he looked up the registry and the owner, Mark Staudacher, through the club membership. He continues, “I called Mark, introduced myself, and asked if it was still for sale. The answer was yes. He explained that the airplane was out of annual inspection and he was going to let it sit in the hangar all winter and would revisit it in the spring. I said, ‘Well, I’m interested, can my wife and I come up and take a look?’ So, we flew up to Bay City, Michigan, and spent the day with Mark going through the airplane and going through the logs, talking about his restoration process, how he bought it as a project and finished it up, and all the work that he did.”

Mark is the one who actually did most of the current restoration. He explained to Mike that the previous owners had bought the airplane in the late ’90s as a wreck and had started the restoration work on the airplane. When the gentleman died in a plane crash in Florida, the project sat for a few years with the wife. Mark reached out to her and was able to convince her to sell the airplane to him. Mark bought the airplane and brought it home and finished the restoration on the airplane that the previous owner had started. Mike comments, “He did a beautiful job on the Waco. I was extremely impressed by the quality of the workmanship and his attention to detail. You could just tell looking through the airplane that it was mechanically sound, so we agreed on a price and shook hands. We left Michigan, and I went on a work trip. I got Mark to agree to let me do an owner-assisted annual inspection on the airplane.”

Mark opened up the Waco and did the inspection, but he left the airplane open for Mike to look at. When he went back to Michigan in November 2025 to get the airplane, Mike spent two days with Mark in the hangar, demonstrating how to inspect the airplane, focusing on all the little idiosyncrasies of this model and what makes it different from a standard. Mike then helped Mark close it all up, and the next day, they fired it up and went for a test flight. Mike did three landings, put gas in it, and flew it home. He had previously checked out in Jim Wilson’s Waco in preparation for going to Connecticut. Jim told Mike, “You really ought to come and figure this thing out,” so Mike flew the Glasair to Jim’s home strip in South Carolina, spent the night with him and Eileen, and went out and flew his Waco that afternoon. Finally, Jim deemed Mike ready to solo. Mike did several bounces that day. He reminisces, “The very next morning, Jim asked me if I remembered everything we had done the previous day. I said yes, and Jim told me to go away and don’t come back for at least an hour. I performed an extensive preflight, took off, flew it around for around an hour, came back and shot a bunch of landings. And that was my Waco checkout.”

Mike paid fair market price for the entire package, which included tools and spare parts for the airframe and Jacobs engine. Mark said, “This is what I want for everything, and you are going to get everything. Take it or leave it.” Mike and Sasha took it. About three or four weeks after they got the airplane home, Mark loaded up a van in Michigan and drove all that stuff down to Georgia, where they unloaded it into Mike’s hangar.

The story about Mike White’s journey to Waco ownership is bigger than one man’s interest in owning a beautiful, rare airplane. The bigger story is how aviation creates community. Aviation has a way of uniting people for a common cause. This story begins with Mike White’s determination to pursue his passion for flying. From working at the local FBO before he reached his 10th birthday, to dealing with a series of flying jobs that either ended in furlough or company bankruptcies, his love of aviation kept him on track to his current position, 747 captain. Besides, Mike White happens to be a likable guy. Then, there are people like Jim Wilson and Mark Staudacher, who, once they know you are serious, are willing to give you 100% to help you reach your goals. Mike also credits the National Waco Club for being a wealth of knowledge and assistance. He also notes that this is the oldest type club in existence. He relates that when the word got out that he’d bought Staudacher’s YOC-1, members were reaching out to him offering their assistance. Although he is a relatively new Waco owner, I have watched him offer tips and tricks to newer owners. This is what makes aviation such a close-knit community, and this is why I love being a part of it. Once again, congratulations to Mike and Sasha White on your beautiful new “baby.”