Howard 500

[GARY HILTON]

Holy Crap! I forgot about the tri-gear Howard at Chino!..I took some pics a few years back...C.R.S. sometimes I get it bad...There is another Tri-gear Howar in Vacaville, Ca. at Nuttree Airport..

[Sully]

I believe Chino is N177L and Vacaville is N6711. I maintained and flew N6711.

[Roger Cain]

I've got the Chino Howard 250 (N177L) listed as built/converted by the Business Aircraft Corp? Yes, the Vacaville Howard 250 is registered as N6711. I took a few interior pix when Jimmy Rollison was doing some cockpit work on it. If I can locate them I'll post a couple.

Here's a nice Howard 250 that comes to Minter Field for their annual show each spring, owned by Wiley Sanders.

[CAPFlyer]

I've got the Chino Howard 250 (N177L) listed as built/converted by the Business Aircraft Corp?

That would be correct. Howard Aero became Business Aircraft Corp in 1963 when it and Alamo Aero Service merged. Any aircraft converted after 1963 under the "Howard" name would show BAC as the company performing the conversion.

BTW, thanks to all correcting me on the tri-gear 250. I missed that part on Mike Zoeller's pages.

[slinky]

If you love these planes, the definitive book that goes hand in hand with Michael Zoeller's website, is Air-Britians "The Lockheed Twins" by Peter J. Marson. It's a little pricy, but well worth it for the histories alone on each airframe....

[geeoh480]

Quick scan on the Zerox machine, but here is N721N as it was being delivered from the factory.

Take a close look at this photo and then the previous color shots. This not a Howard 500, look at the wing, it has the shorter span of the earlier Howard 250, Super Ventura (H350) it later became. I'm going to be a snobish, arrogant person here, but for sake of setting the record straight, Dee Howard sold Howard Aero to BACC in 1964, not 63, and it became Business Aircraft Conversions Corp. which converted the Howard 250 to Tri-gear and the demonstrator had the N250W number for many years. Also the Howard 500 did not have the P2V Neptune gear legs, it did however employ the gear from the PV-2 Harpoon because of it's 35,000 pound weight. There is much misinformation circulating on the net as to what actually a Howard 500 is, and my friends it is not A PV-1/B-34 Bomber conversion. The Howard 500 was a brand new airplane with a brand new type certificate. It took a number of years to get certified because of the transport category it was destined to serve in. When the CAA became the FAA in 1959 Dee Howard flew his prototype in February of that year. There were 22 Howard 500's built and sold, and as of 1976 18 were still in service. The Learstar was a conversion Bill Lear did with the Lockheed 18 Lodestar, and 60 were converted. Lear employed Gordon Israel, Dee Howard employed Ed Swearingen.