Holiday Visit to the Seashore
The Better half and I took a ride down to Point Vicente today. It was a nice clear and warm Thanksgiving Day and a lot of other people had the same idea. The air was clear, the ocean was calm and you could easily see Catalina Island across the channel to the south. To the west south west, if you really tried, you could make out Santa Barbara Island, about 45 miles offshore.
It was also a nice day to jump in your Boeing Stearman open cockpit biplane and take a flight along the shoreline. I took this photo of the plane as it rounded the point near the Lighthouse. It’s painted in the original pre-WW2 Army Air Corps primary trainer color and markings.
This is Wikipedia’s summary of the Boeing Stearman Model 75:
The Stearman (Boeing) Model 75 is a biplane, of which at least 9,783 were built in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s as a military trainer aircraft. Stearman became a subsidiary of Boeing in 1934. Widely known as the Stearman, Boeing Stearman or Kaydet, it served as a Primary trainer for the USAAF, as a basic trainer for the USN (as the NS & N2S), and with the RCAF as the Kaydet throughout World War II. After the conflict was over, thousands of surplus aircraft were sold on the civil market. In the immediate post-war years they became popular as crop dusters and as sports planes.
If you have a pair of red-blue or red-cyan 3D glasses, you might be interested in a 3D picture of this very same airplane that I posted last month on the family blog. It’s a beauty. If you don’t have the glasses, the 2D version is here.
