It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane… Not Really
By Joe Tennis
January, 01, 2008
Reprinted with the permission of blueridgecountry.com

For decades, people believed an airplane dropped from the sky at Powell, Tenn., just outside the Knoxville city limits.

“That’s one of the biggest stories going – that it crashed here – and they made a service station out of it,” says retired antiques dealer Tom Milligan. “I’ve heard that around town all my life.”

Well, it certainly seems to look that way. A small, airplane-shaped structure sits just a few yards from the traffic flow on U.S. 25W, just above a steep-sided hill.

But it was never a plane. It’s simply a roadside oddity leftover from the early 1930s. Brothers Elmer and Henry Nickle built this 58-foot-long bird – the “Airplane Filling Station” – as a way to get motorists to stop along U.S. 25, once commonly called the Dixie Highway, says Joe Inman, another retiree.

Rock Bernard, a Knoxville barber, says, “That was an era when people were pretty much fascinated by aviation.”

Bernard, Inman and Milligan are members of the Airplane Filling Station Preservation Association, Inc., a non-profit group trying to restore Powell’s pretend plane to its original appearance.
Joe Inman (left) and Tom Milligan are members of the Airplane Filling Station Preservation Association, Inc.

In 2003, Milligan founded the preservation association after buying the plane for $20,000. Since then, the group has secured a grant from Knox County to help pay for the building. Members are now selling T-shirts, looking for grants and accepting donations, all hoping to make the plane’s planned restoration a soaring success.

“It’s getting back to what it was originally,” says Milligan, 66. “It’s getting it back to its heyday.”

Originally, motorists would drive under one side of the 42-foot wingspan and refill their gas tanks. Under the opposite wing, mechanics could fix a flat or change a car’s oil.

“This was a working station,” says Milligan.

Over the years, the structure became a bait and tackle shop, a produce stand, part of a car lot and a mobile home business.

In more recent times, the plane has been listed on the national historic landmark register, but the deteriorated building has resembled a crashed plane in more ways than one – the bird was once so covered by kudzu, Milligan says, you could hardly see it.

Yet everybody still seemed to know it, often using “the airplane” as a landmark to give directions, says Inman. “It’s a super reference point.”

It’s going to cost as much as $150,000 to restore the plane, Inman figures.

Then, association members hope to rent the building’s 600-square-foot interior as an office.

“The good thing about an office space,” Inman says, “is it would bring in revenue so we could continue to maintain it.”