Beautiful and Ugly Airplanes

HERE WE GO again! Two more years have passed, and your proudly humble reporter has another batch of ugly and beautiful airplanes for your consideration. An eclectic assortment to be sure, they're at least as ugly or beautiful (one or the other, not both together) as those we've shown before. Some were suggested in your very well thought out letters; others are leftovers from prior deliberations; and still more came by way of lightning inspiration.

Hendon: For the serious aviation buff and/or Scale modeler, a visit to Hendon just outside London to see these rare machines is a pilgrimage well worth taking.

IT'S A TOSS-UP which is more packed with history: the displays in the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, or Hendon itself. Like so many places in England, the area is imbued with tales and legends of the early Celts and their Anglo-Saxon successors reaching back to what seems like the beginning of time. To a visitor from a relatively young country like the U.S.A., Hendon feels ancient indeed. One doesn't go back very far, of course, to trace the "beginning of time" for British aviation. In 1908 an American pilot named Samuel Cody made the first recognized flight on English soil, in a craft given the serviceable, if unglamorous, name of "British Army Aeroplane #1."

Bjorn Karlstrom

IF YOU'VE been a regular reader of American aviation magazines during the past three decades, the legend "Scale drawings by Bjorn Karlstrom" is a familiar one. From the hundreds of such publications in which Karlstrom's drawings have appeared over the last 35 years, the distinctive style of this Swedish artist is recognizable on sight. Yet who among us would know Bjorn Karlstrom if he walked through the door? Bill Winter, the venerable former editor of Model Aviation who was probably the first American editor to use Karlstrom's work back around 1950, has never set eyes on him or even spoken with him on the phone.

Reno Air Races

COMPARED WITH the Indianapolis 500, the Kentucky Derby, and the World Series, the Reno National Championship Air Races is just an upstart. But in the world of airplane racing, not even the hallowed Cleveland Air Races can claim the longevity of the National Championship races, the 25th edition of which was held near Reno in September, 1988. Against a backdrop of air racing's difficulty in establishing continuity, with events flickering out almost on a monthly basis, Reno is a shining light of reliability. This popular and well-attended annual event is also the single biggest reason that the sport of pylon racing still exists. When Bill Stead decided he'd had enough of waiting for someone else to come along and reinvent the National Air Races, he set out to do it himself. There hadn't been a race featuring anything other than the neat little 190-cu.-in.-class Midget racers since 1949, and nothing at all since 1960. In 1962, Stead went to work on the problem.

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