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take photos of the aircraft to document the various
types I had seen, but eventually I started paying atten-
tion to the aircraft serial numbers, as a way of track-
ing if I might have seen the same aircraft in other lo-
cations.

Visiting museums and attending civilian airshows, I
started to realize that the serial numbers displayed on
a few of the aircraft were not the original numbers, so
I started researching the significance of the displayed
number, and what happened to original aircraft: civil-
ian operators change a serial number to reflect an air-
craft they might have flown, or to reflect the number
of an aircraft of historical significance but which was North American Aviation OV-10A, c/n 305-078, delivered
destroyed. By the time I retired and had time to be- to the US Marines in the early 1960’s, went in to storage in
come a volunteer docent at the McClellan AFB Mu- Tucson, AZ in 1992, and has been with Cal Fire since
seum (later the McClellan Aviation Museum, and 1993. Cal Fire operates a fleet of some 20 plus OV-10’s.
now the Aerospace Museum of California) I had ac-
Photos taken at McClellan in 1968 and in 2020.
cumulated a bit of information on various airplanes
and was able to share this with Museum visitors. Also
by then, my camera gear had been ‘down-sized’ to a
single, fixed-lens digital camera and several spare
batteries.

My emphasis has always been on military aircraft.
The photos I have taken are stored on my computer,
as is a database with a very brief description of the
aircraft in the photo. I now have thousands of pic-
tures, but in most cases just a single picture of a par-
ticular aircraft, while the description might include all
the known operators of that particular aircraft. In a
few cases, I have photos of the same aircraft as used
by different operators.

Pictured Left
The Tallmantz P-1, constructed from parts of various
aircraft, was built for the movie “The Flight of the
Phoenix”, released in December 1965. The story is
about a twin-engine transport plane which crashes
during a sandstorm in Libya. The crew finally decides
their only choice is to cobble together parts of their
crashed plane and fly back to civilization; the Tall-
mantz P-1 was the result. The P-1 made several
flights for the filming, but was destroyed in a crash
during the filming of extra footage, in July 1965:
stunt pilot Paul Mantz (the ‘mantz’ in Tallmantz) was
killed. The photo was taken, at Ontario Airport in
California, in June 1965.

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