Tico dc hours12/5/2023 ![]() I’d venture to guess that more people walk the earth today who know why Lucas is called the Prince of Darkness than the total number of people in all of human history who knew Grumman once built a civvie Wildcat. The airplane hung around Key West for a week or so before departing for parts unknown a day or two before my MG lost its mind and fried all its wiring while on my way to work. I suspect that this airplane has changed hands several times since Jimmy Buffet and I wandered Duvall Street, but where did it go? Museum? Crashed? Did some well-meaning but woefully uninformed yahoo “restore” it to the warbird it never was? I don’t know nor do I remember it’s N number or anything else about it other than it wore a typical USN GSB paint job with yellow and white WW2 carrier ID stripes on the wing and tail. Over the years, I spotted that Wildcat in a magazine or two but eventually lost track of it and have had piddling little luck finding out anything about it lately. Mr Foote gave me a tour and a nifty little flier - long since lost - that told all about his airplane. ![]() There were even a couple of small windows back there so the pax would not feel like so much spam in a can. While it looked like every other Wildcat I’d ever seen, this one had a passenger door and a couple of seats in the belly behind the pilot where all that wartime radio gear usually lived. Unless memory fails me, his name was Dick Foote and his airplane was a one-off civilian version built by Grumman especially for a foreign customer. Happened that the Wildcat’s owner was handy and he let me poke about a bit. There might even have been a Mustang in the mix. I made it my business to go see what was what and found a nasty T-28 that would later end up in the water off the end of the runway, a Super DC-3 wearing an old Douglas paint scheme, a very nice Canadian registered B-25 and a GSB Wildcat. While on a three year hardship tour to Key West, Florida, back in the late 70s I spotted several warbird tails sticking up above the scrub and palm trees at the airport as I screamed along A1A with the top down on my green MGB. Rummaging the open box got me to reminiscing about the several Wildcats I’ve rubbed up against over the years - one in particular. ![]() If I can ever get the contractors out of my house so that I can reclaim my bench, I’m going to flail away at an ancient Revell Wildcat I discovered while moving my stuff out of the way.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |