I was emailed several days ago, a woman whose husband recently passed away. He had known Pete Bowers in the '60s, and she said she'd found some old Fly Baby pictures in a photo album and wondered if I'd like scans of them.

They turned out to be pretty neat.

You see, the Fly Baby prototype crashed just a few months prior to the EAA contest at Rockford in 1963. Pete ended up building a new fuselage, incorporating some changes to improve the handling and make it better. For instance, the tail was lengthened by seven inches. While he was at it, the FAA had also demanded a change in N-number...since short N-Numbers like N13P were only to be used on very small aircraft that couldn't fit a full number. So the rebuilt Fly Baby was registered as N500F, and that's what you see in most pictures.

The pictures supplied by Ruth Weston are of the pre-crash version of the Fly Baby. And they're pretty sharp....



The other cool thing was that almost all the photos of N500F show Pete Bowers flying it. These have Phil Weston...which, coupled with the excellent quality, makes me think that Pete himself took the shots.

We haven't figured out the significance of the hand-lettered "E2" on the top of the vertical tail. It's quite possible that this was identification for the EAA contest in 1960...when it was postponed due to having only two contestants. Other pictures of N13P show this number quite faded.

Ron Wanttaja