Red Lane’s DC-8 Airplane Home Is One Awesome Way of Living the Dream

Red Lane, born Hollis DeLaughter in 1939, was a Nashville Hall of Famer, singer and songwriter, a consummate storyteller and artist and, according to legend, one of the most, if not THE most laid-back man out there. So laid-back he was that watching 60 Minutes would take him 24 hours, his friends would joke.

Red Lane was also one of the few people in the United States to live full-time in an airplane conversion, though he seems to have been convinced that he was the only one. His home was a Douglas DC-8 and was widely known as the DC-8 Airplane Home, Red’s home sweet home, an artists’ hangout, and the place you could go to for a good time, with guitar-playing and singing by the fire.

Red served as an airplane mechanic right out of high school, and that’s when he fell in love with planes. His color blindness prevented him from training as a pilot, but he’d eventually get his license upon his return home – which is also when he took his love of flying further, by learning to skydive.

Life as a civilian didn’t stifle his dream of owning “a house that flew,” which started out after a chance meeting with John Wayne’s personal pilot, and it was his booming music career that finally made it happen. Red Lane enjoyed only mediocre success as a singer, but he was a most accomplished and highly-respected songwriter, with collaborations including the likes of Willie Nelson, George Strait, Johnny Cash, John Conlee, B.J. Thomas, and Tammy Wynette.

Sometimes in the late ‘70s, on a visit to Smyrna, Georgia, he saw an old DC-8 being hauled off to be taken apart. He decided to buy that aircraft, for a price that he would later tell friends was in the vicinity of $10,000. He never mentioned whether that sum included the price of the transport to Ashland City, in Cheatham County, Tennessee, where he’d set it up as his home, but the detail is not to be ignored. It took five flatbed trucks almost a month to transport the aircraft in pieces, because of speed and travel time restrictions on the highway.

Red’s home started out as N8605 45426/49 DC-8-21, the 49th of the 556 units of the McDonnell Douglas DC-8 produced, a narrow-bodied long-range airliner built in the U.S. by American Douglas Aircraft Company starting with 1958. It was operated by Eastern Air Lines from 1960, then by Air Spain from 1971, before ending up with American Jet Industries in 1978.

When Red bought it, it was on its way to the scrapyard, but to him, it was a home that was in need of some maintenance, as he would recall in his only TV tour of the place, in 2011. The video is available at the bottom of the page.

Once in place, Red propped the plane and stripped it bare of the 177 seats, the four PW engines and all the wiring. The engines were sold for parts. The interior was then decorated as you would a regular home, with Red adding a comfortable living room, a fully-equipped kitchen, a proper bathroom, and a bedroom.

What is not shown in the video tour, but is detailed in the book Once Upon a Time... There Was a Tavern Volume 1, by Lathan Hudson, is that the cockpit was still pretty much intact, though not original. The only original parts still (though not to this aircraft) were the captain’s chair and the pilot’s yoke: everything else was recording equipment that Red had set up in such a manner as to resemble an aircraft cockpit. At night, when everything was turned on, the impression of being inside a functional cockpit was even stronger.

This room also doubled as a music room, where Red would hang out with friends and collaborators, and a party venue. To that latter end, it came equipped with a bar. Always a behind-the-scenes kind of guy who didn’t enjoy the spotlight shining directly on him, he never got into the specifics of the build, except for the few details included in this story.

In 2011, when Red agreed to show off his airplane home for TV cameras, he was building a secondary structure underneath the aircraft, around the landing gear. Unlike the upper part of the home, this one used traditional construction materials like brick and mortar, but integrated and left visible the entirety of the landing gear. Also there, on one of the walls, Red had requested a fireplace flanked on either side by small waterfalls – a kind of fire & ice motif, if you will, but one that he never really explained to outsiders.

No word if he ever got to complete this second structure under his airplane home: Red Lane died in the summer of 2015 at the age of 76. All traces of his airplane home have gone cold since then, though there’s a chance it’s still preserved today.

As for the never-ending discussion on whether the kind of expense involved in converting an airliner into a home is worth it, Red never let himself get dragged into it. “I have never ever woke up in this place wishing that I was somewhere else,” he said. “Never.” To him, whatever money and effort went into making this old DC-8 into a home were worth it, because he was living the dream.