Goose riders in the sky: to resurrect a worldwide market, a small-town startup melds a 70-year-old design with modern manufacturing.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Antilles Seaplanes LLC - Cover story - Company overview

Not much is left except the smell of oil on old metal. The cockpit is stripped, its instruments useless. A wiper dangles on one side of the arched windshields, creating the appearance of a man squinting into fog. Twin control wheels with chipped black paint crown the yokes that the pilot and co-pilot pulled and pushed to take the airplane up and down. They're disconnected. The wings are gone.

That's for now. But emerging from the past--from a time some call the Golden Age of Flying--is an enterprise that offers a glimpse of the future of manufacturing in North Carolina. On a hillside in Gibsonville, where the only water to be seen is the dew on morning glories, V.L. Manuel is building seaplanes. His Antilles Seaplanes LLC is manufacturing an aircraft that began life in 1936, re-creating it, piece by piece, from scratch. Its Grumman G-21 Goose is no lark: Nobody else in the world is building seaplanes. "Is the market 50 airplanes a year? Yeah, sure," says Jens Hennig, operations manager of the Washington, D.C.-based General Aviation Manufacturers Association. "Is it more? Possibly."

Manuel hopes so. An accountant and former Internal Revenue Service agent, he and friends have invested about $7 million in the venture and are seeking a few million more to speed up the timetable. In a new 20,000-square-foot factory, its floors as clean as a nun's conscience, a handful of workers pore over the original drawings on workbenches. Machinists and mechanics grind and rivet metal, stamping out parts to microscopic tolerances. Computer-controlled lathes hum while welders crackle.

A pair of gutted fuselages waits as corroded and worn parts are stripped and duplicated, the beginnings of a stockpile for when production begins, possibly next year. The two old Grumman G-21s are being rebuilt as demonstrators. But the airframes of Antilles Seaplanes' Gooses will be new, down to the last nut and washer. More than 20 potential buyers from around the world have signed nonbinding preproduction contracts, Manuel says.

"That's the wave of the future," says Teresa Ratcliff, director of the North Carolina Industrial Extension Service at N.C. State University. "That is, finding a niche in the global market and then marketing yourself through electronic commerce. That's what is going to propel the renaissance of manufacturing in North Carolina."

On a wall in Manuel's office hangs a world map. "Anywhere there's blue on that map and there are no airfields, we can sell them," he says. "The allure is that it can get you places you can go only by boat and seaplane. That's why they were so romantic. That's why they made movies about them."

In 1936, Humphrey Bogart and Pat O'Brien starred in China Clipper. Bogie played the pilot of a Martin M-130 flying boat, which began overseas service only a few months before the movie was made. The lumbering four-engine giants took more than a day to span the Pacific, their passengers dining on white linen, sipping martinis in wood-paneled lounges and drowsing in sleeping berths.

That same year, a gaggle of New York millionaires, wanting to fly from their Long Island mansions to the Manhattan docks near Wall Street, commissioned Grumman Aircraft Engineering, then based in nearby Bethpage, N.Y., to build 10 smaller flying boats. Thus hatched the Goose. The G-21, with its twin 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney air-cooled engines and 51-foot wingspan, could carry 10 people, cruise at 180 mph and fly 800 to 1,000 miles nonstop.

The Goose won legions of fans. It was...