Back in the '60s,
Pete Bowers did a little thinking about the Fly Baby model 1C. The
1A is the monoplane, the 1B is the biplane, and the 1C would have been
a parasol-winged airplane, kind of like a Baby Ace or Pietenpol.
This didn't get much beyond the speculation stage. My guess is that too much stuff had to be re-done. To allow access to the cockpit, the plane would have needed a wing center section set forward of the cockpit (like the biplane) and the wings swept back to maintain the CG. But that would mean you couldn't use the stock wings...the ribs would be crosswise to the airflow. The 1C would have needed brand-new wings, just like the biplane. Pete probably figured it wasn't worth the bother.
But here is an idea of what the Parasol Wing Fly Baby might have looked like....
I
can't help it: I'm a sucker for military paint jobs on Fly Babies.
I've always loved the WWII British camouflage scheme, and figured I'd give
it a try on a Fly Baby. I dubbed the design the "Hurribaby"...just
to forestall those who might call it the "Spit-Up".
Interestingly, Drew Fidoe is planning to paint his Fly Baby this way. His difference is that he is going to paint the belly yellow...that was standard British practice for training airplane. Rather than a trainer, though, he's actually going to duplicate the paint job of the Miles Messenger that Field Marshal Montgomery used. Monty's airplane had the D-Day invasion stripes, too. Here's what Drew is thinking of....
Even scarier, he's got an old Volkswagen Bus that he has been driving
to Fly Ins until he gets his Fly Baby finished. His wife, Marie, will be
taking over the 'Fly-In Support Chores' when Drew's plane is ready.
Marie wants the VW to match the plane, and here's what she drew up
I've been mulling over the potentials, lately. I like the "Hurribaby" scheme, but, in all honesty, I don't really think flying in busy airspace with camouflage paint is all that good of an idea. Which leaves us, really with the 'tween-wars period, so ably captured by Bob's airplane.
So: What could I shoot for? First, I'd like to try to mimic a real aircraft. It doesn't have to look that close, but I preferred something historical to point at. The pre-war US Navy paint schemes were pretty nice, with yellow wings, gray fuselages, and lavish sections of colored paint to denote the squadrons the planes were assigned to.
I had been thinking of a mythical Curtiss F9C-3 monoplane prototype, when my mind flashed me with a vision of another nation that used gray and large splashes of paint on very pretty aircraft: Japan.
It really flooded in, then. I remembered that the Flying Tigers' first fighter adversary wasn't the Zero, but a *fixed wing open-cockpit* fighter.
Yow. A bit of web-digging, and I found it: The Mitsubishi A5M "Claude," the immediate predecessor to the immortal Zero. The neat thing was, it was *very* close in configuration to the Fly Baby (except for the radial engine, of course).
So I had to do it. I had to do a drawing of a Fly Baby painted up like a Claude:
This drawing has only three cosmetic changes from the standard airframe: Filled-in gear Vs to go with the wheel pants (to simulate the big spats of the Claude) and a extended turtledeck.
To see a model of the "real" Claude, go to: http://www.motionmodels.com/ww2jap/claude.jpg
Cleaning It UpBy the way, here's the original picture.
Hey, this picture's
not even fake. It's a photograph of an actual instrument I have in
my airplane.
Moonraker's Cockpit
ClubI came up with "Cockpit Club" cards as a memento for these fledglings.
I used my inkjet printer and business card stock. On one side was
the logo, and on the other side was information about my airplane...performance,
size. etc.
I've seen enough guys
try the pre-WWII Army Air Corps paint jobs, I figured I'd see what could
be done cosmetically to make the Fly Baby look more like the P-26 Peashooter.
The attached drawing incorporates three minor and one major costmetic modification.
The raised turtledeck, the fabric-covered landing gear Vees, and the wheel
pants are all trivial and things that have been done before. The
only major change is the addition of a ring-shaped fairing over the front
end of the airplane to simulate the radial-engine ring of the P-26.
Not completely sure how to do this...though it probably wouldn't take much
more than a cowling front like the Graham Lee Nieuports use....
Long Range Fly
BabyHow to get the fuel boom past the propeller arc is a problem left to the student....
You see, there
was a little fly-in happening in the background, and it had a great, big,
DeHavilland Turbo Otter on Floats parked behind me. It *really* distracted
from the hero...uhhh, the Fly Baby in the foreground. So I used Photoshop
to delete the Otter. That's why the tannish-colored trailer behind
my windshield looks a bit fuzzy. A small version of the original
is to the right....
Here's one you
can't blame me for. George Trepus, a friend of Pete's from way back
when, sent me this drawing of an inverted-gull-wing Fly Baby. Says
George, "Pete and I talked about the possibility of such a variation lots
of years ago. Maybe cantilevered or possibly a center section with wire-bracing,
or both. I got busy raising a family." Pete never dropped the idea
of the bent-wing, as his two-seat Namu
had the feature.
Comments? Contact Ron Wanttaja.
