Mark Sell, 33, spent 10 years restoring a 1946 airplane that sat unused for decades. After restoring the aircraft to a nearly brand-new condition, Sell, an agricultural engineer with McLanahan Corp., spends his ­weekends flying around Blair County and its farms.

MARTINSBURG — For decades, the 1946 Aeronca Champion that sat in Mark Sell’s uncle’s hangar did little but gather dust.

As a child, Sell would sit in its cockpit, playing with its non-working instruments and imagining cross-country trips to Midwestern cornfields.

“It had just set,” Sell said. “Everything was rusted and corroded.”

Now 33, Sell spends his weekends flying that same two-seater airplane over Blair County’s towns and farms. It took more than 10 years of work — as many as 2,000 man-hours, by Sell’s estimate — but his family heirloom today looks just as it did when it rolled out of an Ohio factory seven decades ago.

“They always talked about flying it,” Sell said of his father and uncle. “I guess I just like to do things the hard way.”

An agricultural engineer with McLanahan Corp., Sell has the background and training to understand complex machinery. But his love of aviation goes back further, to a childhood spent among a flying family.

Sell’s grandfather on one side was a mechanic, maintaining Army Air Force B-17 bombers during World War II. On the other side, a tradition of general aviation goes back decades.

Sell himself has flown casually for 15 years, having piloted a collection of small rented aircraft after working part-time as a fueler at Altoona-Blair County Airport at Martinsburg. But all the time, the battered old Aeronca was waiting in its hangar.

“I was always working toward this,” he said.

Sell’s Champion — serial number 7AC-5967 — was one of some 10,000 built shortly after World War II. At just 775 pounds, the plane was designed for returning servicemen who wanted to use their skills casually at home.

It came in one color scheme: a vibrant red and yellow painted over a cotton fabric surface. A few hundred variants were made for the U.S. Army in the Korean War and later used by the Civil Air Patrol.

Sell’s plane came from a dealer in Tyrone and cycled through a series of central Pennsylvania owners before ending up in his family. For decades it sat unused, its wooden interior damaged and its fabric coating rotting away.

It was in his teenage years that Sell began the long, difficult work of restoration. Working under two consecutive mentors — only qualified technicians are legally allowed to lead airplane restoration — Sell purchased parts and watched the plane come together.

He began in earnest after college, sourcing parts from 20 suppliers and contacts.

“It wasn’t a one-man show, that’s for sure,” Sell said.

As he stripped the plane down, then rebuilt it, Sell saw the attention to detail Aeronca workers took with the delicate aircraft. The hand-fastened rivets still held from their original placement in Middleton, Ohio.

“I realized it was more like working in a museum than rebuilding an airplane,” he said. “It’s kind of humbling to pull it apart and think of someone in the ’40s putting it together.”

On April 23 — 15 years after the process began — Sell took his plane into the air the first time. Small, bumpy and equipped with just a handful of dials and indicators, it rides as one might expect.

The sometimes rough ride hasn’t stopped Sell from taking up his wife, Lauren — and his daughter, Dana, before her second birthday.

“She wasn’t quite sure what to think,” he said with a laugh.

Sell is one of a small handful of Blair County residents who fly antique and experimental planes. Some restore old models as he did; others assemble aircraft from kits in their own garages and hangars.

It’s a niche group, but local clubs and online forums help them keep in touch with fellow builders and pilots across the country. Sell said he hopes to one day take his Champion to their biggest national gathering in Oshkosh, Wisc., a dream he’s had since his childhood moments in its cockpit.

His father and uncle who once owned the plane aren’t too sentimental, Sell said, but their family tradition could someday continue with a few hops to Oshkosh.

“They were pretty excited, I think,” he said.

Mirror Staff Writer Ryan Brown is at 946-7457.