My earliest memories are aviation related. From my first airplane ride in a J-3 Cub to the plywood biplane that my dad made for me to play in when I was four years old. The intent of these photographs is to not only document the aircraft, but to express the beauty of them in flight or at rest on the ground. The photographs in this book are in chronological order to give a feel to the flow of the shows. Where I was able, I included the pilots's names. I knew that Jimmy Franklin and Bobby Younkin had crashed but while researching I discovered that some of the other pilots had also been killed in crashes. I made note of this in the captions. Hopefully, this book can serve as a memorial to those skilled pilots as well as their beautiful aircraft that were destroyed in those crashes.



This book is dedicated to my father, Vern Beilby. I blame my love of aviation on him.