Looks like lots of fun!!!!!! Have fun!
Lou- When I saw the title on this thread I thought it was going to be on the Skybolt air-launched IRBM we traded off, along with IRBMs in Turkey, for Cuban IRBM removal.
Hey Taz, are you sure you're not thinking of the Skybolt crisis with Britain? We "traded" (unofficially, of course, the official language was "modernization") Jupiters in Turkey for removal of the Cuban missiles. Might be foggy memory here, but I don't think the Turks had anything that would launch a Skybolt (B-52 or Vulcan were the platforms) in '62. I know they got Starfighters in '62, but didn't think they had BUFFs. Could easily be wrong, but I thought the US and UK were the only players in Skybolt. (In part because we didn't exactly trust the Turks with C&C of nukes. Jupiter bases in Turkey were US manned, IIRC)
Chris- The Skybolt was going to be fitted to both US bombers and the V-bombers of the era. The UK was really chapped off when the program was cancelled and there was a Skybolt crisis until the US provided Polaris missiles and sub technology to the UK. The Turks had nothing to do with Skybolt, just the Jupiters we had there. The official story was that ICBMs and SLBMs negated the necessity for Skybolt, which had test failures, but the timing of Kennedy's cancellation and the later inclusion of air launched ballistic missiles in SALT showed they were just another chess piece in the Cuban Missile Crisis. That you will not find in Wikipedia.
Apologies, Taz, I misread your post as "we traded Skybolts in Turkey", which prompted the question. Someday if you're ever on the East coast, I should show you some of the archival stuff I have around the Cuban Crisis. It's a fun read.
Chris- Very pretty. Looks kind of like a Smith Miniplane, but a bit more substantial. The Cuban Missile Crisis documentation sounds interesting. We were in LA while my father was at Space Systems Development for the USAF during the crisis, so thinks were a bit tense for a while.
Now that is the way it should be done! A complimentary dressing to the lines of the airplane, not a psychedelic explosion of a disjointed effort to be a graphic designer when you aren't one. A nice treatment that doesn't jar the viewer and lets one look at the airplane as well as the paint job.
Skybolt's out. Christen Eagle II is in! Going to be a 1/2 owner. Not the actual plane, but you get the idea. Image Unavailable, Please Login
This was my question too. I guess it has a constant speed prop, also important for aerobatics. EDIT - never mind. The Christen Eagle is an excellent plane, many say better than a factory Pitts. I guess you know that they are hyper-sensitive on the controls, (I assume it has aileron spades) as an aero plane should be. Just looking over the side seems to put you into a 20 degree bank. As these were kits, however, a lot depends on the quality of the builder as well as the plane kit. I had experience with two builds of these back in the 1980s, one was just good - while the other was great.
