Aug. 17--As a boy growing up in Alaska, Doug Lee played with his sister in a wrecked Cunningham-Hall biplane.

The vintage aircraft had crashed on an airstrip at the family's gold mining operation. "It was just fun to play in," said Lee, now of Eau Claire.

Imagination got to take flight Thursday when Lee's 13-year-old son, Eric, rode in a vintage aircraft during the American Barnstormers Tour. "It was awesome," Eric said of the open-cockpit flight.

The tour touched down Thursday at Eau Claire's Chippewa Valley Regional Airport and continues through Saturday. Visitors can view more than a dozen vintage aircraft from the 1920s and '30s, while pilots and crews in period costumes share the history of their planes.

Eric, an aspiring aviator, has flown with the local Experimental Aircraft Association chapter. He will get to take flying lessons if he maintains straight A's in school and completes his Eagle award in Boy Scouting, Lee said.

Lee's father was a bush pilot, and Lee took flying lessons before illness grounded him. Lee said he will fly vicariously through Eric -- "My son's going to do it for me."

One proud pilot on the tour is Eric Presten of Sonoma, Calif., owner of a 1909 Bleriot XI replica and author of books on vintage fliers. The Bleriot, which was the first plane to cross the English Channel, was built only six years after the Wright brothers made the first successful flight.

Sixty years after the introduction of the Bleriot, American Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. "It's pretty amazing, really," Presten said of the advances in aviation.

The tour presents "pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to view so many antique airplanes together, said Dave Alley of Lake Hallie. He and others from EAA Chapter 509, a flying club based at the airport, are volunteering at the event.

"It's like the museum coming to you for free," he said.

Erin Ripienski of Chippewa Falls attended with her husband, Ken, and their son, John, 9.

"It was neat to see the biplanes and the motorized couch a guy was driving," she said.

A restored 1928 black and orange Travel Air 6000 biplane, which once hauled firefighting smoke jumpers in Idaho, impressed her husband.

"It was very early for a passenger plane -- and it has a restroom," Ken Ripienski said.

The pilots were knowledgeable about the history of their planes, he said. "It's fun to see the simplicity of the early age and how it's developed up to the modern age."

Wachter can be reached at 715-830-5828, 800-236-7077 or [email protected].

Copyright 2012 - The Leader-Telegram, Eau Claire, Wis.