I thought that some of you might be interested in some photos of the Planes of Fame's gorgeous art deco P-26 'Peashooter', a rare airworthy survivor from the between-the-wars era of military flying.
One of only two genuine survivors (the other being in the NASM collection), it was recovered from Guatemala in the '50s by Ed Maloney. A static replica is displayed by the USAF Museum at Dayton, and a pair of airworthy replicas have been under construction in Indiana for a number of years.
http://www.peashooter.net/
The P-26 was ably demonstrated by Steve Hinton as the show-opening act at last month's Chino airshow. This was the first event that it had flown at since the early '80s, and they prepared and repainted it especially for this weekend.
They put up a very unusual formation of P-26, Seversky AT-12, P-51D and F-86 - the speed differential must be enormous between the P-26 and F-86, but they still managed to keep the formation closely together for two passes and circuits of the airfield - piloting of the hghest order.
The engine is started by a crew member giving it a few shots of prime through an access panel in the port side, then hand-cranking the inertial starter. Announcer Gordon Bowman-Jones captures the unique sound for broadcast over the PA - about the only thing that he managed to get right over the whole weekend.
Saturday's flypast in the sunshine.......
Sunday was much more overcast.
The formation then broke up for individual flypasts, although they did formate the P-26 and AT-12 with one of Tom Friedkin's Grumman F3F recreations for one pass.
After Saturday's display, they parked it in the static area, so here are some detail shots for those interested.
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