Jonathan Baron
New member
The chief problem, Dan, is that so few - meaning next to none - of the true Bellanca fleet, other the 14 series, exists in any form. There's the Airbus I mentioned in Oregon, the CF at Silver Hill, Maryland (you need to be part of a guided tour through the entire Garber collection to see it, and have the tour guide plead, and ultimately demand, that you stick with the group) there are a couple of Skyrockets piles of parts deep in hangars here and there, and so on. The replica of Miss Veedol got wrecked on the Herrick's Air Tour when they let some dweeb land it.
We're not a nation of history buffs like the Brits. Generally people have to see an airplane or - better - see it fly before they can reasonably have interest in it. Very few pilots, for example, have the Jupner collection of books. Now, if people saw, say, an Alexander Bullet and knew Giuseppe didn't just look at it, but took elaborate notes, the bulb would go off in their brains....except that long term Bullet was wrecked, I'm told, but you get the idea. We have all sorts of flying examples for most major aircraft lines, but I challenge you to find more than one Cessna pilot out of a thousand who wound even know that the Cessna AW existed, much less recognize one if they saw it. How many know that the original Cardinal was not a Cessna at all?
Some say that there would be much more interest in early Bellanca efforts if they'd let Lindbergh fly the WB2 instead of that aerodynamic and physical monstrosity he ended up with. Still, for most folks, if you can't touch it, can't fly it, can't even see it, then we're in the territory of esoteric interest. Such interests tend to be passionate but, by their very nature, are shared by few.
Jonathan
We're not a nation of history buffs like the Brits. Generally people have to see an airplane or - better - see it fly before they can reasonably have interest in it. Very few pilots, for example, have the Jupner collection of books. Now, if people saw, say, an Alexander Bullet and knew Giuseppe didn't just look at it, but took elaborate notes, the bulb would go off in their brains....except that long term Bullet was wrecked, I'm told, but you get the idea. We have all sorts of flying examples for most major aircraft lines, but I challenge you to find more than one Cessna pilot out of a thousand who wound even know that the Cessna AW existed, much less recognize one if they saw it. How many know that the original Cardinal was not a Cessna at all?
Some say that there would be much more interest in early Bellanca efforts if they'd let Lindbergh fly the WB2 instead of that aerodynamic and physical monstrosity he ended up with. Still, for most folks, if you can't touch it, can't fly it, can't even see it, then we're in the territory of esoteric interest. Such interests tend to be passionate but, by their very nature, are shared by few.
Jonathan
