Happy 100th, Pete Bowers

Today would have been the 100th birthday of Pete Bowers, who designed the Fly Baby aircraft like I've been flying for the past 30 years.

Pete had a classic engineer personality, which meant he wanted things to be stated as precisely and correctly as possible.

A couple of years before his death, I met Pete at Seattle's Museum of Flight to talk about Fly Babies and show him some of the images and other material from my web page.

I had prepared a three-ring binder with the web articles and the Fly Baby pictures. Interspersed in there were a number of the cartoons and drawings me and several of the folks had done for the 40th anniversary.

He got a kick out of the "Far Side" cartoon version that graces the side of my own airplane.

But when he got to this picture, he stopped. He looked at the "There are only two kinds of aircraft: Single Seaters and Trainers" tag line, and frowned.

"You know...that's not really true, Ron....."

http://www.bowersflybaby.com/forsale/corps.jpg

Ron Wanttaja