Oldbaldguy Posted October 12, 2023 Share Posted October 12, 2023 If I can ever get the contractors out of my house so that I can reclaim my bench, I’m going to flail away at an ancient Revell Wildcat I discovered while moving my stuff out of the way. Rummaging the open box got me to reminiscing about the several Wildcats I’ve rubbed up against over the years - one in particular. While on a three year hardship tour to Key West, Florida, back in the late 70s I spotted several warbird tails sticking up above the scrub and palm trees at the airport as I screamed along A1A with the top down on my green MGB. I made it my business to go see what was what and found a nasty T-28 that would later end up in the water off the end of the runway, a Super DC-3 wearing an old Douglas paint scheme, a very nice Canadian registered B-25 and a GSB Wildcat. There might even have been a Mustang in the mix. Happened that the Wildcat’s owner was handy and he let me poke about a bit. Unless memory fails me, his name was Dick Foote and his airplane was a one-off civilian version built by Grumman especially for a foreign customer. While it looked like every other Wildcat I’d ever seen, this one had a passenger door and a couple of seats in the belly behind the pilot where all that wartime radio gear usually lived. There were even a couple of small windows back there so the pax would not feel like so much spam in a can. Mr Foote gave me a tour and a nifty little flier - long since lost - that told all about his airplane. Over the years, I spotted that Wildcat in a magazine or two but eventually lost track of it and have had piddling little luck finding out anything about it lately. I suspect that this airplane has changed hands several times since Jimmy Buffet and I wandered Duvall Street, but where did it go? Museum? Crashed? Did some well-meaning but woefully uninformed yahoo “restore” it to the warbird it never was? I don’t know nor do I remember it’s N number or anything else about it other than it wore a typical USN GSB paint job with yellow and white WW2 carrier ID stripes on the wing and tail. Everything else remains a mystery. The airplane hung around Key West for a week or so before departing for parts unknown a day or two before my MG lost its mind and fried all its wiring while on my way to work. I’d venture to guess that more people walk the earth today who know why Lucas is called the Prince of Darkness than the total number of people in all of human history who knew Grumman once built a civvie Wildcat. While I don’t miss that English electrical system one bit, I’d love to learn what happened to Mr Foote’s wonderfully unique airplane. easixpedro and coogrfan 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mkd1966 Posted October 12, 2023 Share Posted October 12, 2023 Dick Foote's FM-2 Wildcat was N11FE and has been owned by the Collings Foundation for probably 8 - 10 years now and I believe they keep it on display at their museum up in Stow, MA... Dick Foote was always a regular participant for many years at the TICO Warbird airshow in Titusville... Mike coogrfan and Oldbaldguy 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oldbaldguy Posted October 12, 2023 Author Share Posted October 12, 2023 13 minutes ago, mkd1966 said: Dick Foote's FM-2 Wildcat was N11FE and has been owned by the Collings Foundation for probably 8 - 10 years now and I believe they keep it on display at their museum up in Stow, MA... Dick Foote was always a regular participant for many years at the TICO Warbird airshow in Titusville... Mike So glad to hear that it found a good home! mkd1966 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oldbaldguy Posted October 15, 2023 Author Share Posted October 15, 2023 Hunh. Using clues supplied above, I let my fingers do the walking and discovered that I was only about half right in what I remembered about Dick Foote’s airplane. Time will do that. Another weird warbird I remember seeing in the flesh some six decades ago - this time somewhere in South Carolina - was a T-28 someone had converted into a four-seat sedan. Painfully homely contraption that thankfully never caught on. Then there were those B-17 and PV-2 fire ant sprayers…. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coogrfan Posted October 16, 2023 Share Posted October 16, 2023 https://www.aerialvisuals.ca/AirframeDossier.php?Serial=20175 Jack 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oldbaldguy Posted October 16, 2023 Author Share Posted October 16, 2023 11 hours ago, coogrfan said: https://www.aerialvisuals.ca/AirframeDossier.php?Serial=20175 Wow! This is a lot of information and photos! Definitely a keeper. Seems I was mostly wrong in what I remembered. I saw it not long after Foote acquired the airplane and I could have sworn he told me it was a bespoke build by Grumman. At least I got the foreign owner part right although the timing was wrong. Very interesting. Thanks to all! I’m tempted to take a saw to my old Revell kit and….. coogrfan 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coogrfan Posted October 16, 2023 Share Posted October 16, 2023 Warbird Registry FM-2 Wildcat/Bu. 86680 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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