Today I displayed and my friends took pictures and video of my P 51 B along side the full scale P 51 C BettyJane at the Leesburg, Fla. airport. After watching the full scale P 51 C make its first flight of the day with a passenger on board, the Collings Foundation P 51 C crew informed me that I was next up to make a flight on this beautiful fighter plane. Stunned, I didn't know what to say but I was not going to turn them down. After an amazing takeoff and climbing through a blue patch in the overcast clouds the pilot instructed me and demoed how he wanted me to execute a series of maneuvers- left and right level 360 turns, left and right wingovers, and left hand barrel rolls (2). I was grinning so hard my face hurt. When I get my feet back on the ground in a few days I will go through the hundreds of pictures my friends took and post some here. A few years ago I built a display model of their C model and shipped it to their headquarters and museum in Stowe, Mass. Where they have hung it in offices of the foundation. It took quite a while to put this display model (standoff scale) together, and even longer to build a shipping crate that could protect it and withstand forklift trucks.
Here are a couple of shots of the display plane. The instrument panels were made from pictures of the real plane's panels(it has two fully functioning cockpits for flight training). And in the dark, shining a dim light inside the panels appear to actually light up. The firewall forward was hand carved balsa around a liteply box that supports the display prop and hand built balsa and ply spinner. Covering is Ultracote Chrome to simulate the highly polished full scale BettyJane. the finished model weighed 13 pounds. The landing gear and tail surfaces came from salvaged crash parts, cleaned and refinished. The fuse and wing are new Topflight ARF D model parts bashed into a C model.