When I was a little kid (1956ish) I remember seeing an old biplane flying over the sugar cane fields near my family’s house in Pearl City. I asked my father what it was and he told me it was a Stearman PT-17 that had been used as a trainer aircraft in WW2 (my old man had been in the Air Force after being drafted in early 1945). The plane…
When I was a little kid (1956ish) I remember seeing an old biplane flying over the sugar cane fields near my family’s house in Pearl City. I asked my father what it was and he told me it was a Stearman PT-17 that had been used as a trainer aircraft in WW2 (my old man had been in the Air Force after being drafted in early 1945). The plane was being used by Oahu Sugar Co. to spray the fields with DDT (yikes!) and fertilizer pellets among other jobs, and that was one of my first memories of airplanes that got me hooked on aviation subjects as well as building plastic model kits. I sometimes wondered what happened to that Stearman after Oahu Sugar stopped growing and processing sugar cane. I’d like to think that it’s flying somewhere and not having been thrown away into the ash heap of “progress”…
When I was a little kid (1956ish) I remember seeing an old biplane flying over the sugar cane fields near my family’s house in Pearl City. I asked my father what it was and he told me it was a Stearman PT-17 that had been used as a trainer aircraft in WW2 (my old man had been in the Air Force after being drafted in early 1945). The plane was being used by Oahu Sugar Co. to spray the fields with DDT (yikes!) and fertilizer pellets among other jobs, and that was one of my first memories of airplanes that got me hooked on aviation subjects as well as building plastic model kits. I sometimes wondered what happened to that Stearman after Oahu Sugar stopped growing and processing sugar cane. I’d like to think that it’s flying somewhere and not having been thrown away into the ash heap of “progress”…