@ - Is it ERCOUPE or AIRCOUPE?

  I note with sorrow the passing of three living legends, all black (back then); Mrs. Charity Adams Earley on 13 Jan 2002, the first black woman to receive a commission (1942) in the U. S. Womens Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Womens Army Corps - WACs) and the comander of the only battalion of black women to serve overseas in WWII, and Charles (Charlie) Roach on 11 Dec 2002, a friend and colleague who was a former Tuskeegee Airman (and I never knew until a few months before he died!); two gutsy people!  Then, on 04 Jul 2002, we lost Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., only the fourth black man to graduate from West Point (shunned all four years!), the first black Air Force general, and the C.O. of the famed Tuskeegee Airmen.

Anent the Comet "Authenticast" 1:432 aircraft recognition ("spotter") models, the original brass dies are for sale!

While not about aviation, per se, there is a book about the Fairchild Aerial Survey photos, "Cities from the Sky: An Aerial Portrait of America", by Thomas J. Campanella, which shows incredible views of aircraft, including Pan Am's Sikorsky S-40 "American Clipper" over Manhattan in 1931 (front cover and page 31), the airship Los Angeles "moored" to the Empire State Building in 1931 (page 35), and a glorious shot of bell Telephone's Ford Trimotor NC-417 H over Brooklyn in 1930 (page 120).  There are also a number of airfields such as East Boston (Logan, 1927, page 18), Glenn H. Curtis (cum-North Beach/LaGuardia/NY Municipal, 1931, page 45), and Floyd Bennett (1933, page 45).

03 Jul 2002 - American Steve Fossett landed his Spirit of Freedom balloon safely on 04 Jul 2002 (Australian time) at Durham Station cattle ranch, some 870 miles northwest of Sydney, thus ending a record-breaking first solo balloon flight around the world!

URGENT - help save Helsinki's historic 1930s Malmi Airport (at end of LaGuardia Marine Air Terminal coverage)!

GEORGE C. DADE - This page, while hardly limited to such, is especially about Long Island, the "Cradle of Aviation"; with quite a bit about George C. Dade, an early LI flier (born 26 Jul 1912 in Blackduck, Minnesota) who chauffered Lindbergh and soloed on 19 July 1929 at 16 in an OX-5-powered Roosevelt Aviation School Kinner-Fleet^@ and then flew an identical plane (even in RAS livery!) on his 80th birthday!  George is the young kid helping Lindy on with a parachute in that famous photo (which was taken in 1928 AFTER the Paris flight; George's dad made him go to high school on the big day!*).  George Dade grew up on Roosevelt Field (he lived in the old Moisant hangar #11!) and made pin money by flying over the field lying down in the back of Aerial Advertising's converted old Keystone bomber, announcing the events and soliciting customers for joyrides through a big megaphone.  Things got modernized when they installed a public address system in the plane and he used a microphone; later, ca. 1932, A. A. added chase light signs under the lower planes.  This led to skywriting (single airplane), then skytyping (using five airplanes, which continues to this day), and finally chase signs on blimps (Goodyear and later Fuji, etc., also continuing).  Dashing young George flew back and forth over Long Island Sound in his little Aeronca C-2 to court his beloved (the late) Edith Motte Gorman in Connecticut and they were married 09 Nov 1935.

George Charles Dade passed away on 27 May 1998 at the age of 85.  I had the honor of working with George Dade, taping his plentiful reminiscences for an oral history.  He was a great gentleman and will be sorely missed.  The new Cradle of Aviation Museum at Mitchel Field in Nassau County, George Dade's "baby", opened on 20 May 2002.  See also George's recollection of his first experience of the Long Island Rail Road on my Long Island Motor Parkway page.

(31 May 02 photo by and © 2002 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved.)

(31 May 02 photos by and © 2002 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved.)

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V-1 BUZZ BOMBS - Long Island's NEWSDAY for Tuesday, 14 Jul 98, reports (from AP) obits on three Werner von Braun associates on Page A35.  It states that they "were original members of von Braun's team of engineers who developed the V-1 and V-2 rockets"!  The V-2 was definitely a rocket but the V-1 Buzz Bomb was most definitely NOT!  The V-1 was nothing more than a pilotless jet plane.  It was powered by a pulse jet engine, exactly the same kind as the "Dyna-Jet" we kids could buy for models after the war, only much bigger; that's why it made its distinctive buzzing sound.  It was an early ballistic missile in that it was set on course at launch and went its merry (and often erratic) way from then on.  That's why our Allied pilots could fly alongside and gently touch its wingtips with theirs and flip it over so it would crash away from the city it had been targeted to hit.  The V-1 had no elaborate guidance system other than its gyros and so could neither take evasive nor corrective action.  NEWSDAY, AP's done you in.

Speaking of Buzz Bombs, there's an American one at the Cradle of Aviation Museum; seems we built a few copies, too late to use in WWII.

Here, courtesy of the Confederate Air Force's Air Group One, is the YFM-1 for your delectation:

There was a Twin Ercoupe; I told a correspondent that it ran off with a Twin Mustang!

Clearly, this is not the end of the Twin Ercoupe story, so I moved it to the Aviation Continuation page 5, where there is more room.  There is an Ercoupe Owners Club keeping the marque alive.

The twin Ercoupe was two fuselages put together (one was #707), with twin cockpits for a total seating of four.  The plane could be controlled from either cockpit {rather like the the P-82 Twin Mustang - SB,III}.  "It was used in airshows during the 1950's."  The August 1998 Flying has a picture of it near the back of the magazine.

A Twin Ercoupe has been found in a field in New Mexico (2007); see Aviation Continuation page 5!   (13 Sep 07)

* - see the story of the Ercoupe/Aircoupe, the brainchild of prolific inventor Emile Berliner's son, Henry.

See also Richard Wilkens's Ercoupe site, where he has amassed a "genealogy" of them, leaving only some 1,248, of the more the 5,600 Ercoupes built, to be documented!

Coverage has been moved to Aviation page 5 and greatly amplified.

What others were there?  Would you believe a Twin Cub?  Ayuh!

    [* - my old buddy who was my SA-16 source called 16 Jan 02 after a hiatus of some 30 years and,

Said buddy took his teen grandson to a small air museum to see an SA-16 and an H-21, both in very bad shape;after viewing both crates (er - aircraft), the young gentleman looked at his grandfather and opined that he (the boy) was lucky to to even exist!

How did that B-24D, the "Lady Be Good", end up in the Libyan desert in April of 1943?  [This is NOT funny!]  A long-gone buddy was a Merchant Mariner in the Mediterranean at the time and claims their LORAN (or whatever) bearings were reversed; they were heading north to Italy and the bearings indicated they were going south!  The B-24 was on the same heading and apparently reversed course.

Incidentally, in May 1959, that plane was found and the hydraulics were removed and shipped back to Bendix for evaluation.  Pall Corporation's Aircraft Porous Media subsidiary, where I was then Manager of Support Services, received the old filters for evaluation (not that we'd made them; we didn't exist back in WWII).  The components were fine, only the external surfaces of the O-rings were charred from long exposure to ozone at high ambient temperatures (this was true of all the hydraulics).

Similarly, in the 60's, we got back a B-58 Hustler bomber main hydraulic manifold, which we made for Convair; it included all the hydraulic filters and back-pressure valves and differential pressure indicators and such in one aluminum housing nestled in the nose-gear well.  Well (did I really say this?), this particular unit was from a plane that had landed with a collapsed nose gear and had run the length of the concrete runway nose-down.  Our manifold was the toughest component above the lower skin and formers and bore the brunt of the skid.  The USAF wanted it IRAN'd (Inspect and Repair As Necessary); HA!  The manifold had been neatly sanded down to half its diagonal size and there wasn't anything left with which to work; IRAN, indeed!

In the early 60's, I worked late and weekends at Pall/APM and one Saturday received a frantic call from American Airlines.  A new 707 had just lost its main hydraulic power when a paper filter disintegrated and the pump sucked up the paper.  Pall/APM made replaceble stainless steel mesh filter elements and had models for the entire 707 hydraulic system, which Boeing had steadfastly refused to buy.  AA wanted them and NOW!  Some phone calls to top management and we were in production over the weekend!

When Boeing introduced the 727 trijet, both American and TWA restored Ford Tri-Motors for VIP publicity flights.  The company where I worked at the time got an invitation from AA and, as the resident air buff, I went.  One of the AA trikes (they restored two) had come from Shell Oil's Venezuelan exploration operations.  I found this out after the flight, in which we flew from Zahn's Airport over Long Island's Jones Beach at wave height and circled the KUNGSHOLM or GRIPSHOLM below its Promenade Deck level.  I took numerous detailed photos to show an ex-Shell pilot who had a Jivaro spear over his mantel with shreds of dried human flesh, no less!  It was his plane; his log book had the S/N and his photo album had pictures of his co-pilot skewered to the ground with the spear through his chest and that plane in the background.  Later, I was fortunate enough to wangle a ride in TWA's trike as well, without such gory revelations!

Going back in time, while at camp in the Adirondacks ca. 1942, I, for some incomprehensible boy's reason, buried my Meccano Dinky cast metal model of a British high-winged 4-engine transport (it turns out NOT to have been the Avro York), with red props and camouflage paint, under a tree behind my bunk, which I then forgot to retrieve; on a visit ca. 1980, the director kindly allowed me to dig up the area but, alas, no plane!  An antique toys and military miniatures shop in Manhattan gets $350 for a similar old model today!  In Jan 99, I ran across a reproduction of an old Imperial Airways poster with an illustration of a similar airplane with registry G-ABTI; any Britishers out there know what plane this was?  No, but a Dutchman wrote from Holland 03 May 00 that the York wasn't even test-flown until 1943 and that my Dinky was an Amstrong-Whitworth "Ensign" (see below and Dinky Meccano Aircraft Models on Aviation page 4):

(Photo cropped from Dutch image of Dinky catalog)
[Thumbnail image - click on photo for larger image.]

Rigids, Blimps, and Balloons

My Choices

Boeing 307 Stratoliner

DISASTER STRIKES! - on 28 Mar 2002, the Flying Cloud, on her inbound leg for King County International Airport (Boeing Field) hit the water in Elliott Bay in Seattle!  She had an indicated malfunction* in the landing gear and the pilot put her gently into the water just by Salty's Restaurant; the crew of four stepped onto a wing and were rescued in minutes and she was fished out shortly thereafter, completely re-refurbished, and flew across the country for the last time, landing at Washington's Dulles International Airport on its last flight, 06 Aug 2003, (the first 307 flight had been on 31 Dec 1938).

Faller used to make (ca. 1960?) static model airplane kits of about 4"-6" wingspan that had plastic micromotors to turn the props.  The motors, which were about 6-8mm dia. x 25-30mm long, burned out fairly early on.  I still have a Bf-109 and an He-111k, somewhere, and should dig them out for photos.  Does anyone make replacement motors for these old Fallers?   (22 Mar 08)

There is some aviation-related material on my Champlain College pages; Champlain was originally the Army's cushy Plattsburgh Barracks and then Plattsburgh A.F.B.  Champlain was one of the five ACUNY (Associated Colleges of Upper New York), GI schools built in a big-ass hurry after WWII; another was Sampson College, formerly the WWII Sampson Naval Training Center and later Sampson A.F.B., and the Sampson AFB Veterans Association has a museum in Sampson State Park there.