Warbird Information Exchange

Sorry if i hurt any feelings with the question. Spoke to a man over the weekend from Topeka Ks and he told me about several rides he had in A-26 as a kid. The best i can remember is the owners name was Ed Covington or close to that. I am sure the first name was Ed. The man said the AC crashed into a mtn out west. Does anyone know the story?

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Well if I can't rollerskate around my playpen while smoking and drinking a beer, I'm staying home..

N4813E 6/26/88 Ed Counselman
Counselman and Murray had purchased the plane surplus and were flying it to an air show "in Taos". They encountered a violent storm in the Baldy area that disabled their navigation equipment. Knowing that they needed power to clear Baldy, they put the throttles ahead full. Unfortunately, the plane was not level at the time, and instead was nose down. Accordingly they essentially did a full-power dive into the side of French Henry.
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief ... 1213X25919

Ed and the Invader were based at Deer Valley airport in the north Phoenix, Az area and I have many fond memories of the bird parked in and amongst the Thunderbird Aviation fleet of old warbirds. I was just a kid and was too busy to bother with a camera in those days. A decision I very much regret these days! As I recall the old girl was equipped with many executive mods including tip tanks if memory serves and was painted in something of a pseudo Counter Invader camo scheme.

Thanks

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Well if I can't rollerskate around my playpen while smoking and drinking a beer, I'm staying home..

This is an A-26 which doesn't seem to have been much photographed, judging by the lack of images on the net. I first saw a photo of it in Flypast, possibly a couple of years before its demise.

Apart from that this photo is on Martin Simpson's A-26 site: http://napoleon130.tripod.com/index.html

http://napoleon130.tripod.com/imagelib/ ... et=tlx_new

T J

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Guess I was wrong about the tip tanks. It has been a VERY long time!

I could swear there are wing tip tanks in the 87 caf brown field airshow pic I sent Tj. Do you have that pic Tj? It's in a box here somewhere, I must have deleted it from my Hotmail as i had limited storage back in the day. The crash was in 1988.

Pictures are coming in about a week or so.

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Well if I can't rollerskate around my playpen while smoking and drinking a beer, I'm staying home..

Well John, this is the only photo I have of N4813E in the camo colors. No idea where it came from! If this is not the one I might have lost it when my Hotmail account went straight to h*#@ some years back.



I also looked at the Flypast I mentioned (Feb. 87 issue) where the photo of 13E appears. No tip tanks there either. Nor are there in any photos of this A-26 when owned by the EPA.

T J

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Thanks.., I think my and others memory is just getting mixed up by the camo- looks so much like a K that had tanks and this one does not .

Just to get things straight in my files, this is the photo you sent me?

Could it be that you have seen photos of N500MR in early 1991 when it first got the camo colors, but the name "Gator Invader", nor the cowl and fin flashes had been added? It had/ still has the tip tanks installed.

T J

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Wasn't Gator Invader the A-26 that belonged to Dave Brady down in Georgia? If I remember right, he collided with it in his T-37 and was killed.

I was/am based where Brady and his collection were. IIRC, all of the "big" airplanes in that collection were "Georgia *something*". After he hit the A-26 with the Tweet, the Tweet went down, killing Brady and a passenger. The A-26 caged an engine and circled, waiting for emergency personnel, then RTB'd. The A-26's prop was hung on the wall of the museum for years afterwards. The airplane was later sold, but I don't know where it is today. It had the ring spar, big windows aft of the wing, and a couple of other mod's.

Hi Tj the pic isn't showing. I think I just mixed it up in my memory witha K model. 60 mins did a story a couple of years ago about memories getting contaminated , one memory gets mixed in with another. Unless you are Marilu Henner.

Different A-26s here gentlemen, although they are all On-Mark's.

The crashed A-26 is On-Mark 44-35964 N4813E which was used during the 70s by the EPA (Enviromental Protection Agency) out of Las Vegas, NV before Counselman got it. He had two A-26s (N4813E and N303WC), the latter of which went to Dyess AFB as a static display. I had a contact within the Doc's family to get me more info, but that was lost with the demise of my Hotmail account.

"Gator Invader" is On-Mark 44-34769 N500MR. It had been owned by the late Lloyd Hamilton, and was raced as #16 at the California 1000 at Mojave in 1971. It came in 7th, which was faster than a couple of F8F and P-51s... Then it went to John Mark at Oshkosh, who also owned a P-51D. A pilot in San Jose by the name of George Rivera bought and brought it to Oakland for restoration in the early 80s. It flew for a short while on the west coast airshow scene before being sold to Bill Farrell. That is when it got the sinister camo which it wore until being sold to TV station owner Minos Kiriakou of Athens, and ferried to Greece. It is now silver with a "Tasmanian devil" cartoon.

David Brady owned On-Mark 44-34766 N9150 which is currently with Howard Keck. This is Dianna Converse's former Benbix racer #91. Then brought up to Marketeer status by On-Mark. During the 1970s it was a drug runner that was based out of Van Nuys. Eventually it was caught and sent to the "sin bin", in this case Castle AFB. How it got back into civilian life again I don't know, but it did and went through several owners, including a stint as a movie extra in "Havana" starring Robert Redford. After Brady's death in the T-37 it was resold out west and went to Keck who is keeping it in immaculate condition at Van Nuys.

T J

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Make my day, punk!