For Gary Holbrook
Just so you know, what I did was request and pay for a copy of the FAA registration and airworthiness records that the FAA has, and then reviewed and reported what I found in those records. The research on the Forum is a collaborative process, and anyone including yourself as well as Board members are free to participate as long as they follow the Forum rules. If Board members, or anyone else for that matter, are expected to be perfect in all the research they contribute, no one would participate. It is a bar that is too high to meet. In the mean time, we try our best.
You wrote:
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4.) I am not disputing Mr. Andrew M McKenna’s statement that his 10-E information was “gleaned from the FAA registration records”, but I do dispute the implication of some of it’s information. His post includes the line “10/1/77 - N355B Sold to Vikings of Denmark, Inc., Denmark SC”. I know for a fact that Bobby Frierson (owner of “Vikings of Denmark”, a skydiving operation based out of Barnwell SC) already had possession of the 10-E as of April 16, 1977, because my friends and I made several skydives out of the 10-E on both the 16th and 17th, over Rocky Point, NC, during Wilmington’s (NC) Azalea Festival weekend.
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Your post made me go back and review the information I got from the FAA, and indeed, I got the date of the sale to the Vikings of Denmark wrong. It would appear that the bill of sale was dated 10/1/76, not 1977, and the registration by the Vikings in their name is dated 1/13/77. I've edited my original post in this thread to reflect this correction. Sometimes the photocopies are hard to read and in somewhat confusing order. Copy attached.
You also said:
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5.) Mr. McKenna states that “The last airworthiness record the FAA has was a major repair and alteration form 337 dated 4/14/1969 for an engine overhaul, so it would appear that nothing that has been done to the aircraft since has been reported to the FAA. The last application for an airworthiness certificate in the FAA records was submitted by Provincetown- Boston on 7/3/56. Makes you wonder a bit about the records the FAA has, but my guess is that it is not in airworthy condition, and hasn't been for a while.” Although I am not disputing what the FAA has in its current records, I find it hard to believe that it had not been deemed airworthy since 4/14/1969 (or was it 7/3/56?). Mr. McKenna also states “makes you wonder a bit about the records the FAA has, but my guess is that it is not in airworthy condition, and hasn't been for a while.” Mr. Gillespie agreed. I can’t personally verify what date the 10-E was last used for skydiving, but my last skydive out of the 10-E was on February 17, 1979.
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Note - I'm not an FAA Airworthiness Inspector, so what follows may not be 100% accurate. The records for airworthiness at the FAA are not the same as the aircraft being in airworthy condition. The FAA requires notification of any major repairs or changes to the original airworthy configuration. If no major repairs are done, or if no one properly reports such repairs to the FAA, then their records would not contain any information. In this case, it would appear that no one reported any modifications or major repairs after 4/14/1969. That doesn't mean that the aircraft wasn't airworthy at anytime after that date, and it could easily have had annual inspections and remained in airworthy condition every year after 1969 including when you flew in it in 1979.
Did the Vikings modify the aircraft for skydiving? Probably, but apparently they didn't report anything to the FAA. We do know that Grace McGuire did quite a bit of work on this aircraft, but none of it seems to have been reported to the FAA. Whether that was an oversight, or she never really intended to fly it again, I certainly don't know. Given that the aircraft was in "rotten" condition when she got it, I find it hard to believe that the kind of work she would have had to do to get it back in airworthy condition would not have required filing multiple Form 337s, but that is just my opinion. In any case, no F337s were submitted to the FAA that are currently in their records. Either they were not filed, or simply are lost to the FAA's archive. I don't know the answer.
I do object to your characterization that TIGHAR has "significantly misrepresented" the history of this aircraft. We put out the info we think we have to the best of our knowledge, figure out what is wrong, and then improve the accuracy from that point forward, which was the whole point of this thread. You have helped to clarify some of the history which is a great result, but I don't think you had to approach it with the level of animosity that is, in my opinion, contained in your postings. I'm glad to see that you've cooled off a bit in later postings.
I hope that you now see that we are not trying to seriously misrepresent the history of CN 1042, but rather we're trying to put together a more accurate picture of that history.
Thanks for your participation.
Best
Andrew