Welcome back to my blog. As always, your visit is appreciated. This blog post has a particular sentimentality for me personally, but I digress.
The aircraft profiled is the Howard DGA-15P. I can confirm, seeing it up close, this is a beauty of a restoration. The photo was taken at the Hillsboro, OR air show. It should be noted that an earlier model of this aircraft was a successful four-seat racing aircraft, winning both the Bendix and Thompson Trophies in 1935, the ONLY aircraft ever to win both races. These aircraft were produced by the Howard Aircraft Corporation from 1939-1944 with a total of 520 built. An unknown number were "drafted" by the military for service during WWII. The US Army utilized them as officer transports and as air ambulances, with the designation UC-70. The US Navy liked them so much they contracted Howard Aircraft Corporation to build hundreds of DGA-15Ps to its own specifications. They were used under several designations as utility transport (GH-1, GH-3) for officers, air ambulances (GH-2), and for pilot instrument training (NH-1).
Now that I've covered the background and history of the aircraft, let me get back to the sentimental nature of this airplane model. Well, we have to go back to the early 1980s. I got the somewhat crazy idea, prodded by my roommate at the time, to parachute out of a perfectly good airplane. And that we did, at Perris Valley in California. You guessed it, it was a Howard DGA. The one I jumped from looking nothing like the one shown. First, there was not a lick of paint on the plane - none, zilch, nada, zero. It was all bare aluminum which, to be honest, does pretty well in the dry climate of southern California. Still, it looked pretty worn out. Second,the two seats in the back were removed. This "modification" made more room to hold five jumpers. As a relatively newly minted aerospace engineer, I recall in a fleeting way, questioning if the airplane was airworthy. But the thrill of the jump blotted that thought out. And so I jumped and survived to tell the tale and in the process made a memory of a lifetime.
Talley ho!
Steve