In mid-1950's the Navy commissioned Temco to develop a tandem two-seat jet trainer. On March 26, 1956, the first Pinto Jet rolled onto the runway. They were then contracted to build 14 more planes for additional testing. The Continental J-69-T-9 turbojet was used in the all instances for its serviceability even though Temco wanted to use the General Electric J-85 engine. This hurt the performance and eventually led to the program being cut in 1960 after only 14 TT-1 Pinto Jets being made.

In 1998 Lewis Shaw bought #11 Pinto. Ezell Aviation quickly went to work fully restoring it.The original J-69 engine, which produced 930 pounds of thrust, was replaced with the more powerful GE J-85-17A, this more than tripled the thrust to 2,850 pounds. Also important was improving the fuel system which was very limited in a trainer model. Adapting Boeing wet wing technology and tip tanks from a Mitsubishi MU-2 doubled the capacity and allowed a flight ranges of 800 miles. 7,000 feet of wire were ran to update and add a new IFR avionics package.