Holding Out For A High-Flier Buyer -- World's Only Civilian-Owned Skyhawk For Sale

The former owner of a nightclub for teenagers and the head of a big construction company have formed a unique partnership in Seattle: buying and selling military jets.

Stacey Prineas and Leroy (Bud) Welcome showed off their latest offering recently, a former Navy TA-4J Skyhawk jet trainer similar to ones once flown by the Blue Angels and believed to be the only such civilian-owned airplane available in the world.

Asking price: $5 million.

"We're trying to make a business out of it," said Prineas, former operator of Skoochie's nightclub and now the managing partner of Welcome Aviation. "We're trying to bust through the market."

Prineas said about 2,100 of the jets were built. Most of them now are in aircraft graveyards, though countries such as Malaysia still have some in active military use.

WAITING FOR A BUYER

Rick Millson, a former Blue Angels pilot who flew Skyhawks on 250 missions over Vietnam in the 1960s, now flies the Skyhawk for Welcome Aviation.

Millson said he's amazed at the people all over the United States who want to buy and fly military jets - and who have the money to do it.

Among Prineas' and Millson's customers are cellular-telephone-company owners, inventors of software programs, a doctor in Florida and a businessman in Kalispell, Mont.

They are, said Prineas, the kind of people who once bought such World War II planes as P-51 Mustangs and F-4U Corsairs. "Now they're into jets. We feel somebody will step forward. We've already had an offer. It just wasn't enough."

Their whole approach to business isn't one of conventional suits and ties. Prineas and Millson were wearing white tennis shoes and leaning back with their feet on their desks as they sat in Millson's office at Boeing Field.

The jet venture started, said Prineas, after he and his partners closed Skoochie's in 1986, partly because of high insurance costs and partly because their lease on a former bowling alley near Seattle Center had expired. Prineas said he considered getting into an effort to keep open The Monastery, a teen club on Boren Avenue, but that didn't happen.

By 1988, Prineas was casting around for something else to do, and got to talking with his friend, Welcome, president of the J.J. Welcome Construction Co.

"Bud wanted to help me out," said Prineas, adding that Welcome had a longtime interest in aviation.

In 1988, said Prineas, a friend approached Welcome to see if he could find an A-4 jet. Welcome and Prineas began looking around, and found the Skyhawk trainer - or at least most of the parts for it - in a hangar in Florida.

The plane was built in California in 1971, and last flew about 1973, said Prineas. After that, it "sort of fell through the cracks" and acquired still another unique, but necessary, feature -it ceased to be a whole airplane.

THE SUM OF ITS PARTS . . .

Federal law prohibits selling former military jets outright, except under special circumstances, such as to friendly foreign governments.

The intent, said Millson, is to prevent domestic terrorists from getting really powerful weaponry.

Similar laws enforced by the State Department also prevent the reimportation of such planes into the U.S. Now the reassembled Skyhawk has been licensed and certified as being assembled out of parts.

Welcome Aviation had the plane trucked in parts to a hangar at the Arlington Airport, where the restoration was done.

To get to this point, Prineas said he and Welcome went through an amazing range of experiences, including making deals with a general in Honduras to get an unused Pratt & Whitney jet engine to power the plane.

While he declined to be specific, Prineas said such an engine costs "over several hundred thousand dollars."

Eventually, the plane was rewired, all the instruments and flight systems were rebuilt and it was painted in Navy colors.

There's even a tailhook under the back, to catch the arresting cables on an aircraft carrier deck, although Millson said it's just for looks.

Now, Prineas said, he and Welcome aren't sure where their venture will take them, because the economy is weak and the market for used $5 million jet fighters is a little uncertain.

It's possible, he said, that they could lose everything, although he doesn't think that's likely and he predicts the Skyhawk will be worth $10 million in 10 years.

"The airplane we built is probably the nicest civilian jet in the world," he said. "We feel an aircraft is like a fine painting. It can only go up in price."