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The final flight of Joe Rendzio

People watching knew something was wrong soon after his T-28 warplane took off. Those he left behind feel sure he died trying to avoid a bigger catastrophe.

By BILL COATS
Published June 23, 2005

	[Photo courtesy of Charlie Brammer]
	Joe Rendzio poses in the cockpit of his restored T-28 airplane. He worked on the plane for six years before attempting his first flight in the aircraft.

LUTZ - Apparently, Joe Rendzio didn't tell a soul that his big moment was at hand.

He had invested six years and more than $100,000 in his 50-year-old warplane, bringing it from a desert junkyard to gleaming airworthiness. It was a labor of love. It had lured him into retirement. It had made Rendzio, 74, a fixture at Tampa North Aero Park.

But nobody knew Rendzio was, at last, taking his T-28 aloft.

"I think what he intended to do was fly it and then come home and say, "Guess what! I flew the airplane!"' said Rendzio's wife, Eileen.

Lori Risley, who learned to fly at the Wesley Chapel airport and had become friends with Rendzio, added: "I don't think he wanted a bunch of people around, talking and making him nervous."

So on June 3 of last year, few bystanders took notice as the T-28 taxied toward the runway; Rendzio had done many "taxi tests."

Then he gunned the plane's powerful engine and rose steeply toward the northwest sky.

Now people watched. And quickly, they knew something was wrong.

An unidentified witness would later tell a federal investigator that "something relatively small and rather dark fell from the plane" about six seconds after takeoff. Another witness said an object appeared to pop out of the back seat.

Airport owner Charlie Brammer saw the takeoff from his office porch. He recognized bad news when he heard the T-28's engine shut off, backfiring. That signaled either engine failure or Rendzio's attempt to tame an unruly plane.

Witnesses watched the T-28 bank to the left, its tail rapidly shifting left and right. In its path lay Lexington Oaks, with 1,200 houses. Then Brammer saw the T-28 veer back to the right.

"Another 45 degrees, he would have been coming straight back at the runway," Brammer said.

But Joe Rendzio didn't make it that far. The T-28 plowed into a forest next to a row of homes on Silver Charm Terrace. The impact snapped an 8-inch-thick pine.

Rendzio died living a lifelong love of aviation.

Eileen Sautner lived a few blocks from Rendzio near Passaic, N.J., when she met him on a winter day. They were 14, and Joe refused to share his Flexible Flyer sled.

"Right then and there, I disliked him," she said.

But Rendzio was gregarious and funny. The pair grew into acquaintances, then pen pals, then lovers.

Rendzio already was flying a Piper Cub at 14. His mother had given him a flying lesson for his birthday, and he bought more lessons with money he earned at a drugstore, Eileen said.

Rendzio later enlisted in the Navy, where he became a technical troubleshooter, which would be a theme in his life. After Rendzio left the Navy at 22, it kept calling him back as a civilian. He worked for a succession of defense contractors.

In the 1970s, a friend in Pinellas County tried to interest Rendzio in buying a private sewer plant. He balked. But Florida still beckoned, and in 1976, Rendzio bought Rolls Axle Trailers, a Tampa manufacturer of boat trailers. The Rendzios moved to Lutz. They owned the company for 15 years, until Joe's interest in airplanes pulled him away.

As Eileen recalls, Rendzio would open the company office each morning, then leave things to her and their daughter, Carol.

"He just wanted to get to the airport," Eileen said.

Over the years, Rendzio had flown and owned a variety of airplanes, enough to have a plane-leasing business and to earn a commercial pilot certificate for single- and multiengine planes. But no plane possessed him like his Navy T-28.

Compared with most private planes at the Aero Park, with typical horsepowers of 180, Rendzio's T-28 was a bull, at 1,425. T-28s were designed as training planes, but the Navy converted many in the Vietnam War for surveillance and air-to-ground combat.

Rendzio found his warbird in an Arizona junkyard. He had it shipped to Florida in 1998 on a flatbed truck.

"He never told me how much it cost because I would have blown my top," said Eileen. Their son John, a school psychologist from Carrollwood, estimated that it cost $50,000 to $60,000.

Joe Rendzio rented a hangar at the Aero Park and worked on the T-28 for six years.

"He was always willing to stop what he was doing and help you and talk to you and pass on whatever knowledge he had," said Ed Unger of New Port Richey, who flies a Piper Saratoga.

Rendzio's project became something of a family affair, with John Rendzio and friends helping out.

Last year was the home stretch. Rendzio took a weeklong training course in California and became certified to fly the T-28. In the spring, an FAA staffer inspected the plane and found it airworthy.

"He was already looking for another one to restore," Eileen said.

In the days after the crash, federal investigators learned much about what doomed Rendzio's flight, but not how he reacted to it.

As the T-28 charged into the air, a metal cover called a "cowling" came loose from the left side of the plane's engine, just behind the propeller. The cowling, comparable to a car hood, flew backward, fracturing Rendzio's plexiglass canopy and leaving orange paint traces. It tore a gash in the vertical stabilizer in the plane's tail.

The National Transportation Safety Board, in its official "probable cause," said simply that the cowling's collision with the vertical stabilizer caused "loss of aircraft control."

Yet something made the T-28 turn toward the right after it initially banked to the left, potentially avoiding a far worse catastrophe. Hundreds of new houses are massed to the left; neighborhoods to the right are more broken up by swamps.

Tim Monville, a senior air safety investigator who wrote the bulk of the NTSB's report, sid said it's impossible to know whether Rendzio accomplished that turn.

Like Brammer, John Rendzio believes his father cut the T-28's engine after the cowling tore loose.

"He always said, if anything ever happened, he would head for a stand of trees," Eileen said. "He said he would shut off the fuel, to make sure it wouldn't burn."

There was no fire.

After the crash, friends and family reacted with letters and e-mail tributes. Invariably, they included phrases like "keep soaring" or "keep flying."

That spirit is reflected in a memorial marker that Brammer and his family ordered for the base of the flagpole at Aero Park.

It ends: "Keep flying, Joe."

[Last modified June 23, 2005, 08:51:20]