Biplane pilot takes sightseers to the air with WWII history - Park Rapids Enterprise
Gray pilots a Stearman biplane, a 1941 Boeing Kaydet PT-17 aircraft used during World War II to train pilots. Gray was raised an “Air Force brat,” his heroes (and family friends) World War II pilots. ” His father, Howard, was in the Army Air Corps training command, having joined the military in 1935. He’d been in the Air Corps six years when the war began. “He and the guys like him built it to what it became during World War II,” Gray said of forerunner to the Air Force. As aerial applicators moved on to more sophisticated aircraft, the Stearmans, considered obsolete, were purchased and restored to their original configurations. Gray, who’d flown with his father growing up, acquired his pilot’s license in the mid-’70s. He purchased his current plane, a Cessna 180, in 1977, the Stearman in the late ’80s. The plane had been a crop duster, he learned, restored by a company in Mississippi. A bit of history: Boeing purchased the Stearman Aircraft Company in the mid ’30s and began production of the model 75. The Army Air Corps placed an order for the model in 1936 and designated it the N2S, nicknaming it the “Yellow Peril. Source: www.parkrapidsenterprise.com
