Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 2, 1991 TAG: 9104020601
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RESTON LENGTH: Medium
The retired Air Force colonel is museum curator at the Academy of Model Aeronautics, overseeing its prized collection of about 400 of the finest model planes ever built.
When he shows up for work at the suburban Washington headquarters of this national organization of 170,000 model plane hobbyists, Bowers must think he's died and gone to heaven.
Crammed into glass cases and hanging from the ceiling of the building's circular atrium are replicas of the biggest names in aviation history - Santos du Mont's box-winged flying machine, World War I Fokkers and Nieuports, Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis," a sleek F-104 Starfighter jet, the space shuttle Enterprise.
They range in size from a nylon-covered spruce model with an 18-foot wingspan, powered by two chain-saw motors, to a gasoline-powered midget with a 3-inch propeller that once clocked 82 mph in a national race.
Among the oddities are a wing-flapping "ornithopter" and a large yellow glider designed to obey shouted ground commands picked up by large microphones in its fuselage. "It didn't work too well," Bowers said.
There's the red and yellow model of a Bellanca Skyrocket that set an unofficial distance record of 454 miles for non-stop flight in 1983 over Florida's interstate highways. And there's the red and silver replica of the "Early Bird," the 1934 Lockheed Orion from which the Detroit News broadcast late bulletins to radio listeners.
The collection also contains some of the cheap, mail-order gliders that Bowers built as a youngster from balsa wood, tissue paper and glue at the kitchen table in his hometown of Cannon, Ga. His hero was Lindbergh.
"During the Depression, you could spend two bits on a movie, and that was it," Bowers said. "But you could buy a 25-cent model plane kit and get two weeks of entertainment out of it."
An older cousin, Bruce Wilder, who lived in nearby Royston, Ga., introduced 7-year-old Bowers to serious model building.
"Bruce was confined to a wheelchair with polio," he recalled. "He sat at his work bench on the front porch in the summertime and built models while I watched. He was very patient with me.
"Bruce would build them. His friend, Manley Mills, would fly them from the schoolyard or the pasture. And I'd stand and watch and get in their way.
"We ordered a 25-cent kit for a Monocoupe, and when I finished it looked more like a chicken coop, but it really started my juices to running."
Bowers dropped model planes when he started playing football and chasing girls in high school. He joined the old Army Air Corps in World War II and became a bomber pilot. He stayed in the Air Force for more than 30 years, mostly flying transport planes around the world.
"In 1947, I was on the Azores and there wasn't much to do,"' he said. "When I found out the Portuguese could make wine faster than I could drink it, I went back to building model planes and I've stayed with it ever since."
Bowers, 66, said his model plane hobby inspired his Air Force career.
by CNB