MOAR AIRPLANE PORN!

These are the last of the prints I digitized last week.

This 1931 Pitcairn Mailwing was used by Pacific Air Transport - one of the small regional airlines that were combined into United Air Lines in 1933 - to transport the mail from Oakland to Monterey to Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast route. It was restored by James Autry over ten years between 1984-94 and I photographed it in 1998. Interestingly, I have a photo of my father standing in front of this exact airplane when he worked for PAT after graduating from the Boeing School of Aeronautics in 1932.

This Douglas B-26C Invader was flown for this picture by Steve Hinton, my candidate for the luckiest guy in the world. He “met his destiny” the first day of First Grade when the teacher had the kids draw pictures on the blackboard and the boy at the other end “could draw much better airplanes than I could” as he once told me. That boy was Jim Maloney, oldest son of Ed Maloney, the guy who created Planes of Fame. It turned out the Maloneys and the Hintons lived four blocks apart there in Orange, California. Steve and Jim became the original “Chino Kids” who grew up in the museum and learned to fly as teenagers. I first saw them in 1972 at the Watsonville West Coast Antique Airplane Fly-In, when Jim flew the newly-restored F6F Hellcat and Steve a P-51, and came to the show where they were a sensation - guys as young as the original pilots flying those planes! In the years since, Steve has become the most experienced warbird pilot in the world. When some warbird is ready for its first post-restoration test flight, he’s almost always the guy who does it. He’s also the pilot in the P-40, P-38 and Zero in the first batch.

This is Steve in the museum’s MiG-15. The photo was taken in January 2000. This is one of several MiG-15s that were imported from Red China in 1985.

And this is Steve in “Susie,” a P-51D Fighter Rebuilders overhauled in 2001.

This P-51D is being flown by Matt Jackson, another well-known warbird pilot, back in July 1997. We did a “magic hour” run along the Malibu coast. We got to Kanan Dume Road and turned north to return to the San Fernando Valley. As the Mustang made the turn, the sun started glinting from the polished aluminum fuselage, and I took this just at the moment of maximum glint. The airplane is restored in the markings of the 325th Fighter Group, unsurprisingly known during World War II as “The Checkertail Clan.”

And finally another shot of Steve in the P-40B back in 1998, taken out the tail of “Photo Fanny.”

And this last shot is Steve Hinton with my nephew, Nathan Elster, back in February 2017.

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