Warbird Information Exchange

Since this and my other posts on this thread almost 18 months ago, I have obtained new information regarding some of the aircraft listed above.

I talked directly (via e-mail) with Edward H. Wale, the former principal of 2BW Inc and owner of N93G (s/n 1130) who I found out is now living way down south in Chile. He told me that N93G was sold and parted out to support other restoration efforts many years ago, but he never bothered to officially de-register it with the FAA.

Although we didn't explicitly discuss it, my continuing research also revealed that the same guy (Ed Wale) was suspected and accused by the arson investigators of being involved in the deliberate destruction of N742PC in 1987. (Although previously listed by others as s/n B-34 but by me as s/n B-35 because it was registered with the FAA as serial number "37782", my research now indicates that it is more likely that N742PC was Grumman s/n B-34 (and formerly USN BuNo. 37781) because USN BuNo 37782, as it was improperly identified on its FAA registration, actually corresponds numerically to OEM serial no. B-35 in my Grumman production records (which is contrary to what is listed by Joe Baugher and others*) and USN JRF-5 BuNo. 37782 was in fact the Edo Corporation's experimental testbed for the Grunberg super-cavitating hydrofoil tests conducted near College Point, NY for the Navy during the early 1960's and it ended up at AMARC/Davis-Monthan AFB near Tucson. With all of that experimental hydrofoil test equipment installed I very much doubt that it was ever released for sale to a private owner such as Mr. Simpson.)



*I found out long ago that Eddy Haynes' Goose Central Web site's Goose Directory page has an error - it is still missing from the first column a reference for s/n "B-37" and that throws off many of the subsequent histories of Gooses with higher serial numbers. I suspect that Joe Baugher may have actually gotten some of his civilian history information from this same flawed Goose "directory" and I have also tired to get Chris Bell, the current owner/hoster of the Goose Central site (since Eddy Haynes died a couple of years ago) to fix it.

In any case, apparently the two men, Ralph S. Simpson and Ed Wale, had a dispute over the cost of restoring N93G. Simpson, the owner of N742PC, had an aircraft maintenance and restoration business in Long Beach, CA (KLGB) and was hired by Wale to work on it, but he wasn't getting paid so he stuck it into a hangar next to the one where his own N742PC was kept. According to the news report that I found, Wale apparently drained the fuel tanks of N742PC inside its hangar and set it on fire! He was also so badly burned in the process that he wasn't initially expected to survive, but apparently did.

Here's a link to the news story that I found online: http://articles.latimes.com/1987-09-05/local/me-1605_1_fire-department

And finally of course, since the time of my last posts on this thread, Ryan "TheBoy" Pemberton and his dad Addison bought N95467 (s/n 1161) from the Palm Springs Air Museum and shipped it to Spokane, WA in order to begin a total restoration to airworthy status again. (Looking forward to seeing and hearing more about that as they makesome progress.)

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