Looked Like Golden Age Simulations Material

[tgycgijoes]

For Christmas my daughter bought me a daily desktop calendar of airplanes and today February 9th this was featured: The Winstead Special. Here is its history:

The Winstead Special was manufactured by Brothers Carl and Guy Winstead in Wichita, Kansas. The airplane was initially used for flying circus work, air racing and barnstorming. Carl Winstead flew it with the "Flying Aces Air Circus" in the late 1920s where circus owner and legendary female wing walker Jessie Woods walked its wings. The aircraft was bought and sold several times throughout the 1930s and made its final flight in 1937 before being placed into long term storage. The airplane was acquired in the mid-1990s and painstakingly restored it to its former glory. The restoration was completed over a four-year period and is restored to its flying circus configuration.

I found it so interesting that I did a Google search just on the off chance that it was created by someone for FSX and here is what I found:

The only place that I found this is at FS2000 but if you would like to download and investigate it here is the link: https://www.fs2000.org/wp-content/uploads/files_download/2013dwn/8n1_scenery.zip

This is the link to the Museum website: https://www.goldenageair.org/

All the aircraft pictured are included flyable AI by the designer G. Clawson. I read though that he used a Tiger Moth not a designed from scratch Winstead Special but the airport is really nice. Its 165MB and photoreal. Nice job I thought

 

[SgtT]

Thanks for sharing, I'm going to check it out this weekend.

 

[tgycgijoes]

The Sikorsky Flyer

I don't have pictures with only professional photographers having a camera for weddings and funerals, and if there WAS a record it has been lost...one night years ago my father and his two brothers and I were sitting outside on a warm summer's evening when my father had come back to Illinois from California for my nephew's high school graduation. They were sharing memories from their childhood, World War II and more. One story my uncle told his mother (my grandmother) had told him about her father was that before he was married and moved to Chicago, still on the farm in Minnesota with HIS parents, he had read about and was fascinated about flying. He was VERY mechanically talented and repaired all the farm machinery when it broke with his machine shop in the barn. HE built an airplane and flew it ONCE! This is how the family legend is told. He was so terrified..I don't know how high it got or whether it was just so fast, faster than the tractor for sure, that he never flew again. That is how the story goes. AND my Great-Grandpa Sikorsky is no relation unless so distant, that I am not in the lineage of Sikorsky helicopters. It's coincidental that THAT Sikorsky wasn't afraid to build and fly "flying machines". Great-Grandpa Sikorsky served in the U.S. Army Infantry in the trenches in World War I. Obviously he didn't want to join the Lafeyette Escaidrille. Like the country-western song: "And that's my story and I'm stickin' to it!" LOL

More documented is the family lament that my grandfather, Dad's father, when his father and oldest brother died sold the farm. Later that SAME farm and all those around it were bought up by the Douglas Aircraft Company in World War II and then after the war it became Orchard Field which is by the why KORD is the ICAO for Chicago O'Hare Airport once the Lund Family Farm and their neighbors up to the Great Depression when it was sold. If you remember before the high pressure formed drink carriers like McDonalds, Wendy's etc. the pop up board drink carriers with the handle...my father DID design that when he worked for the company that made among other things C-Ration and K-Ration corrugated cartons through the Korean War. He showed his boss, but the boss said that no one was ever going to buy something like that that just gets thrown away and is an extra expense, when they could just hand the customers their drinks. No patent was ever applied for by my Dad because it belongs to T. Berry Hodge company being developed on company time. Ironically this was born out many years later. When I owned a hobby shop with my lifelong friend and partner I used to be the "gofer" for our lunches with drinks at one or other of the few snack shops we had in the area. Because drinks were always but in a paper sack and when sloshed around leaked and were at a risk to fall through the bottom, I created a drink carrier for myself from a lightweight corrugated carton and dividers just the size of four large size drink cups. I was asked by the snack shop owners where I got it. Said I made it and would they be interested in buying some. Anyway, my day job was for an advertising firm that used corrugated carton manufacturers and as an estimator I put out bids for 100, 250 or 500 quantities to my specs...25 cents 20 cents and 15 cents respectfully from the lowest bidder. All three snack shop owners gave the same reason from years before. Paper bags did not cost but 1 or 2 cents each and they couldn't justify that expense just to be thrown away. The big franchises have huge buying power making probably 100's of thousands at a time from big manufacturers. Anyway, 40 years later the same answer from "the little guys".

One more story...the next time you twist the metal lid off of a jar of pickles or jelly and for those of us old enough to remember, do not have to find the can opener to pop off the lid, thank my dad's father, my grandfather who invented it while working for The Whitecap Company in Chicago now part of the Illinois Tool Works conglomerate. That story we DO have proof of. For years you could see printed on the side of the lid wrapped around the edge:

©The Whitecap Co. Chicago, Illinois

Likewise no patents are granted to employees that develop on company time and machines.

That is part of my family's history and legends.