Warbird Information Exchange

Biography

My name is Arthur L. Bentley, and I would like to welcome you to my web site. I was born in 1939 and, after a grammar school education, I joined the DeHavilland Aircraft Company at Hatfield in 1956 as a Design Engineering Apprentice. I spent the rest of my career in the aircraft industry at Hatfield - apart from a two year employment at Handley Page Aircraft at Radlett - until 1993 when the Hatfield site closed due to contractions in the aircraft industry. I worked in both the Technical Publications Department and the Airframe Structures Design Department, gaining experience of working on all aspects of the aircraft types that were designed and built at Hatfield during this period.

In the late 1960s I began to create scale and cutaway drawings of aircraft from the Second World War in my spare time. I had my first drawings, of the Hawker Tempest fighters, published in 1973 in the 'Scale Models International' magazine. Many more subjects followed in the next ten years until the demands of family life and the workload on the Airbus projects put a temporary hold on this activity. During this period, I also did a number of drawings for the 'french' and 'Airfix' companies as a basis for some of their model kits.

By the 1980s, my archive of technical documentation began to attract the attention of aircraft restoration groups. I provided assistance for a number of aircraft restoration projects, notably the FW190A-5, then owned by Doug Arnold, in the early 1990s and the Flugwerk project to put the FW190A-8 series back into limited production for the 'Warbird' market.

With the closure of the Hatfield site in 1993, and after many years of experience of producing the scale drawings for the magazines, I moved into publishing, along with two friends Eddie Creek and Robert Forsyth, to form 'Classic Publications'. The books we produced were an immediate critical success with the enthusiast and specialist market they were aimed at. However, the worldwide economic difficulties of the late 1990s and early 2000s had an impact on the business, and I left Classic Publications in 2002 to pursue a long held ambition of setting up my own business as an Aviation Consultant, selling prints of my drawings over the Internet, and offering my services as a freelance illustrator and draftsman.

This site show-cases most of the drawings I have done over the last thirty five years, for various magazines, books, and, occasionally, my own personal gratification. Many other drawings are on my 'intend to do' list and I continue to collect material to back up these intentions. Though at my age, and knowing the length of time required to produce these drawings, I doubt if I will get round to do them all.