Vintage Minor Register

Just joined the Grace household. Should keep me busy until the McEvoy gets here.



It's a 1962 Piper Colt I found over the mountains in Wenatchee Washington. This is real floatplane country out here in the Pacific Northwest, so this is what it will end up looking like:

As a plane spotting young erk in the late fifties I can remember seeing large numbers of Piper Colts and Tri-Pacers after they had been airfreighted and unloaded from Douglas DC 7F's in crates on the North Side of Heathrow. We parked our push bikes and crept into the resricted area to record the factory serial numbers in our notebooks. We could then check these in 'Air Pictorial' the following month or as and when they were registered by the C.A.A. and record a 'cop' in our Ian Allen spotters books. The bulk of these aircraft were registered in the sequence G-AR**.
Last year a local Wortham farmer who had previously flown an Auster Aiglet from his farm strip acquired a Piper Colt or Tri-Pacer which he regularly uses and is frequently seen overflying my village. A lovely vintage aircraft.

Here's one at Heathrow (?). But it already has its UK reg. no. Checking my records, this aircraft was shipped to Ireland in 1977, so this photo could have been taken in 1977. But why not just fly it to Ireland? I must say, the photo looks more like early sixties than late seventies. In which case, it is interesting that it already had its UK reg. on arrival. The clue is in the BOAC steps - BOAC became BA in 1974.