Owner of famous plane stops in HSC

Its not often one goes out to the Hot Springs County Airport and sees an airplane with such a rich and varied history, but this week an An-2 Russian aircraft has been sitting on the tarmac.

Douglas Fulton of Valdez, Alaska, is the owner of the Antonov An-2 and stopped in Thermopolis for a few days before heading out for his next adventure at Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.

Other stops this summer have been at the EAA AirVenture annual event in Oshkosh, Wis., a drop into the rally at Sturgis and plans to hit the High Sierra Fly-In in Nevada before heading to Arizona.

To the casual onlooker, the red, white and silver bi-plane is something you may never have seen before, but for movie buffs, it may stand out as the airplane used in the latest Indiana Jones movie, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

Fulton explained how much of the interior of the plane had been taken out by Paramount Studios for the shoot, even showing how they placed the motorcycle Harrison Ford is seen sleeping on in one of the scenes.

That makes the plane unique, of course, but its history is long, with the first one designed by Oleg Antonov in Kiev, the former U.S.S.R. in 1947. Since then, around 22,000 of the An-2s have been built in Russia, Poland, China and North Korea.

Designed to haul heavy loads from very short runways, often undeveloped air strips, they are still being used today for crop spraying, freight haulers, parachute jump planes and forest fire fighters.

This particular aircraft was built in Mielec, Poland and owned by Lithuanian Airlines until 1994 when it was flown to Sweden along with 13 other aircraft. There, the wings were removed and all of the planes were transported by ship to Saint Simons Island, Georgia where they were reassembled.

Fulton had always wanted a plane he could fly around and live in as well. Being a tall man, it took some time, but he finally found the An-2 and it was not only tall enough he could stand upright in it, but it was the right price, too.

He and his plane were used by the Marine Corps for pilot training in Arizona. He would take off, fighter jets on his heels and he would do low flies, "counting cactus", he said, then drop a parachute dummy and head back to base.

Fulton said there are An-2s still in service with foreign military, so this kind of training helps our pilots should they come in contact with one.

And the plane has been around some with Fulton spending about three and a half months just flying around the Carribean, Central America, Mexico and the like.

Of course everywhere he flies there is paperwork to fill out and he said the further south you go, the more paperwork there is. He said the U.S. and Canada are pretty easy, but its definitely not that way everywhere.

When he's not flying around in the An-2, Fulton owns a helicopter service in Alaska. In the summer months the company flies tourists around the state, but they do a lot of geological work, monitor glacier melt and do supply stops at communications sites in Alaska, too.

Throughout the year they also patrol hundreds of miles of power lines and work fire suppression in the Alaskan Wilderness.