First let me say how I enjoy reading your magazine, but the June 22 edition has some errors that I cannot leave alone!
The Stinson article is one of them (A good flying airplane: Raised around Stinsons, Don Baggett finally gets one of his own). The V-77/AT-19 was indeed manufactured for the British, where it was called the Stinson Reliant (they didn’t use numbers like AT-19) and used almost exclusivly by the Royal Navy as navigation trainers, radio operator/observer trainers and station hacks. They were unusual as they were all Lease-Lend and all of the survivors managed to get back to the U.S., whereas the majority of the other naval Lease-Lend airplanes were simply loaded onto carriers and dumped at sea. An example of another survivor is the Corsair in the naval museum at Yeovilton, UK, that survived because it was in a repair shop, and got forgotten. The rest of the Corsairs, Hellcats, Wildcats and Avengers went to the bottom.
Anyway, the AT-19s made it back and your article states that in order to de-mil them the airspeed had to be changed as it was in kilometers. That is total BS as all British airplanes had the airspeed in knots!
The next statement, that the throttle and mixture worked backwards is also BS. All British airplanes had conventional engine controls, you have got mixed up with the French airplanes that indeed did have the engine controls backwards. None of the Stinsons went to the French other than a few HW-75s from a different contract. The only part of the de-mil statement that is correct is that the fuel gauges were in Imperial gallons.
How do I know? I was there when the last of them were still flying. And now after 13,000 hours and 50-plus years in full-time aviation, I wish I could find one. I did manage to fly one in Louisiana that had just been restored, by Hugh Hutton, in British Navy colors, but that went to a museum. A beautiful flying airplane — just like flying an armchair.
Keep up the good work