August 28, 1992

STORM DEALS CRUEL BLOW TO HISTORIC CRAFT

PAMELA FERDINAND Herald Staff Writer

The clock stopped at 3:50 a.m. Monday in Kendall-Tamiami Executive Airport's main office.

In the hours to come, as hurricane winds grew, Kermit Weeks lost his darlings -- a Russian World War II bomber, a Boeing 100 and a Seversky P-35A. He also lost at least eight more rare airplanes to the storm that demolished his museum with the rest of Tamiami Airport.

On Thursday, airport officials opened one runway and a taxiway. Helicopters rushed medical supplies and personnel to South Dade. And aircraft owners and insurance adjusters received permission to enter the field and calculate damages for the first time.

For Weeks' Air Museum, on the western end of the airport, it could take more than a decade and hundreds of thousands of hours of painstaking labor to get back to square one.

"That's the first Boeing in the world that flew," said Weeks, 39, pointing to a blue, white and red star on the tail of a plane crushed by the green steel hangar that housed all the vintage aircraft. "You can't even put a price on that. It's totaled."

Aircraft enthusiasts from across the state delicately sifted through the twisted metal and airplane parts. To them, Weeks' 6-year-old museum had been an untold treasure at the end of the airfield. Hundreds of tourists came from as far away as Sweden and Germany to admire the historical collection.

Salvaged from the wreckage so far: a WWII bomber turret wrapped in rope and half of another plane's nose.

None of the museum's or Weeks' personal aircraft were insured.

Throughout the rest of the blighted Tamiami airport, planes froze in what looked like bizarre acrobatic stunts. A blue-and- white four-seater passenger plane wrapped itself around the stripped steel post of a hangar. A DC-6 heavy cargo plane rested 3,000 yards from where it was before the storm -- with no visible track marks on the ground.

"Everywhere you look, there's aircraft," said airport manager Clarence Sherrick. "God only knows where some of them came from."

Hurricane Andrew pummeled about 90 percent of the airport's 500 planes, which are mostly corporate or privately owned. Two Bell-412 helicopters lay in ruins. Each cost up to $4 million.

Looters, too, sneaked into the airport and stole tens of thousands of dollars of communications equipment, aircraft owners said.

But planes and helicopters were not the only Tamiami casualties.

Dozens of people stored valuable cars -- vintage Porsches, MGs -- and furniture in airport hangars. Kitsy Vyfvinkel and her husband, of New Smyrna Beach, left a BMW, two airplanes and a helicopter there. All were destroyed.

"We thought they would be safe," she said. "Can you believe that?"