More than a century ago, workers at the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company plant in Garden City built a wooden biplane called the Oriole. This summer, one of the last of them came back. A truck from Washington State pulled up to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in late July carrying a fuselage, wings, a tail, landing gear and a propeller, and the museum has now begun piecing together both the airplane and its story, which turns out to run through Patagonia, Hollywood and a decade of newsreels shot over Long Island.

The museum sits on Charles Lindbergh Boulevard, on the old Mitchel Field grounds, barely a mile from where this airplane was assembled. Almost nothing the museum could acquire would be more local. The plan is a restoration the museum estimates at four to five years, after which the Oriole goes on permanent display.

Built in Garden City for a boom that never came

The Oriole was one of the first airplanes Curtiss designed after World War I, a three-seater that first flew in 1919. The pilot sat alone in the rear cockpit while two passengers shared the front one, which even had a small side door so they could climb in without acrobatics. The fuselage was molded wood, the wings fabric over wooden frames, and the engine started electrically, a luxury at a time when most pilots were still hauling a propeller through by hand.

Commercially, the airplane never had a chance. The war had just ended, and thousands of surplus Curtiss Jenny trainers were flooding the market for a few hundred dollars while a new Oriole listed for nearly ten thousand. Curtiss slashed the price and the Oriole found work anyway, hauling joyriders, racing, and above all carrying newsreel cameramen for Fox Movietone News, who filmed the biggest stories of the 1920s from its front cockpit.

That last job is the Long Island connection the museum plans to honor. When Charles Lindbergh lifted off from Roosevelt Field for Paris in May 1927, Oriole camera planes were in the air with him, filming the Spirit of St. Louis as it cleared the power lines and crossed Long Island. The museum intends to finish its Oriole in Fox Movietone colors, as one of the camera ships that flew from the very fields around Garden City.

The clue painted on the fuselage

Museum researchers are still pinning down the airframe's construction number, but the fuselage carries a registration code, R-197, and tracing it has opened the most unexpected chapter of the airplane's life. R-197 was an Argentine registration from the 1920s. The Oriole belonged to a ranching family near Rio Gallegos, in the far south of Patagonia, whose son Norberto Fernandez took up flying after watching the French airmail pilots then passing through the region, a group that included the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Fernandez made the airplane famous at the bottom of the world. In 1932 he flew it over the great Andean icecap in what is now Los Glaciares National Park, the first pilot to do so, climbing past 11,000 feet in an open cockpit. Locals called him the Patagonian Condor, and the airport in Rio Gallegos carries his name today. His Oriole eventually came back to the United States in the hands of Paul Mantz, the Hollywood stunt pilot, and spent the following decades unrestored, passing through the Movieland of the Air collection in California and the storage hangars of collector Kermit Weeks in Florida.

Its last stop before Long Island was Century Aviation, a restoration shop in East Wenatchee, Washington. When the shop's owner decided to close, he offered the Oriole to the Cradle of Aviation, which had been quietly assembling parts for exactly this airplane for two decades, including a correct Curtiss six-cylinder engine and a set of period instruments. The museum accepted, and the airplane made the cross-country drive in July.

What arrives, and what comes next

The museum estimates that roughly 90 percent of the airframe made the trip, including pieces that would have been nearly impossible to reproduce, such as the original radiator that mounted above the engine and the correct propeller. Some of the century-old wood is rotted and will be replaced, but the restoration team is starting from a remarkably complete airplane, and only a handful of Orioles are known to survive anywhere in the world.

The finished airplane will hang from the ceiling near another new arrival with Roosevelt Field roots: the enormous mural of pre-Lindbergh Long Island aviation that pilot Aline Rhonie painted on a hangar wall at Roosevelt Field in the 1930s, which came to the museum this year after decades of wandering. An airplane built in Garden City, flown over Long Island in the era the mural depicts, displayed beside it a century later, is about as tidy as museum storytelling gets.

Why this one matters here

Long Island's aviation century usually gets told through its giants, Lindbergh at Roosevelt Field and the Grumman plants that built the machines that won the Pacific war and landed on the Moon. The Oriole is a smaller story and maybe a warmer one: a wooden airplane Garden City workers built by hand, which then went out and had a life, filming history, crossing Patagonian ice, surviving in the back of hangars for nearly a century until the town that made it took it back.

For now the airplane is in the museum's restoration hangar. Over the next few years, visitors will get the rarer treat, which is watching a century-old airplane come back together in the same square mile where it was born.