Well, THAT was quite a ride!
I bought the GAS Stearman package when it came out and have been flying it quite happily. However, when Paul announced the Christmas offer of the Crop Duster Demo I was rather ambivalent - crop dusters are just not my thing - until this morning!
Had my coffee, read the paper and sat down for the usual morning's perusal of the internet... as I bounced through the various threads I came upon the latest additions to this one and hit on MZee's screenshot of Wheeler's CF-EQU !!! Whoa...back in the summer of '65 or so I had some down-time on the ramp at St. Jean, Quebec and spent it crawling all over, under (and a bit of 'in') EQU.
So now I'm interested. Downloaded the Duster package, but no sign of the Wheeler bird. OK so it's an addon skin... go looking and find (in the SOH library) Canuck51's paints of EDU and FRZ. Installed, tested, big grin follows. (Many thanks, Peter!)
However, the ride doesn't end there. In the past I've done searches on the net for photos and info on Wheeler - my dad knew Tom Wheeler and this got a happy teenager a bit of special access to their planes - at least the ones around Dorval. So to follow up I searched again this morning and came upon a wonderful source:
https://nbavengers.com/history-of-t...istory-of-the-spray-program-in-new-brunswick/
which led me to it's companion:
https://nbstearmans.com/
BTW, a nice collection of Wheeler history can be found at:
https://nbavengers.com/489-2/wheeler-and-evergreen-quebec/
For those who never heard of Operation Budworm, some of the linked pages will be eye-opening. Running from 1953 to 1973, it was a huge operation to spray (initially using DDT!) the New Brunswick and some Quebec forests to try to combat the Spruce Budworm. At the peak (1957) they employed
190 Stearmans in a single season from as far away as Arizona and SoCal.
(There's a FlightSim voyage for you - ferry your Stearman from Reedley, CA across/through the Rockies, dodge weather across most of N. America to New Brunswick, fly a bunch of spray missions out of dirt forest strips and then, if you haven't bent the plane, fly home through summer thunderstorms to your home in California. VFR, no autopilot, no GPS - right! Hmmm, thinking about the fun of recreating a Budworm base and operations on the Multiplayer forum for online mayhem!)
Anyway, half a day later I've gone through about a third of the Budworm pages and it's been a great day. Not only the aircraft data and pictures, but to read the attached comments and to see names and even words from people I've all but forgotten after some 50 years. I never flew Budworm but had friends and instructors who did, along with AME's my dad knew so it's been a wild ride down memory lane.
So thanks to Paul and GAS, Canuck51 and MZee for dragging me back to my teenage years. It's been a great ride on what's supposed to be Blue Monday
