"You wouldn't think anybody'd care, but folks ask Your Old Pilot all the time about the design of these web pages.  I don’t know a lot about them, but I understand that the artful effects underlying the pages of oldairfield.com are really derived of things from old aviation, including broken goggles.  As such, you can believe me; they are as authentic as they can be.  All the wear, scrapes, scratches and dust are really there.

"For example, I learned the other day that the wood-grain effect on the modoc Wear™ web pages is actually achieved by scanning MIL-P-6070 aviation-grade mahogany plywood.  We used lots of that at the old Lockheed plant out in Burbank when we put together the Vegas there.  Lockheed Vegas were mostly wood until they started making the fuselages out of aluminum.  That was sometime in the mid-30s, I think.  Anyway, the wood grain looks swell on these web pages.

YOUR OLD PILOT

"There’s even an old “Clark-Y” wing rib image on one of the pages.  Those ribs were built from scratch by hand out of Sitka Spruce from Alaska.  They were tedious to make, and each wing required a bunch of them to hold the fabric covering in the right shape to produce lift.  I think the “Spirit of St. Louis” used the “Clark-Y” rib profile.  Regardless, the wood you see on the page backgrounds is authentic stuff, and the rib is just another example.

"When you see fabric, like on this page, the background is made by scanning actual doped cotton fabric from one of the airplanes that landed at the Davis-Monthan Airfield a while back. And you can see the rib stitching cords that were cut when the fabric was removed. You're actually looking at the inside of the fabric under this printing.

"The fabric is from the trailing edge of the right elevator of NC14415, the Beech Staggerwing flown to the old airfield on January 25, 1936 by Nancy Harkness and her new husband Robert Love.  They were on their honeymoon.  I remember them coming in, too.  They landed twice a couple of days apart as I recall, back in January of '36. 

I remember they dropped their ignition key and we had a tough time finding it in the sand.  I finally did, though, by accident about six-months after they left.  Here’s a picture I took of it next to her signature, and that of her new husband, on page 212 in the Register.  Someday I'll clean my fingernails. That was a brand spanking new, pretty airplane. Vermillion and Diana cream as I remember it. You can see some of the paint remaining on the outside of the fabric that's been folded over at the top of this page.

"The metal features on the godunk Gear™ web pages are scans of actual aluminum panels from the trailing edge of a Boeing B-17 right wing, just forward of the aileron.  I’m guessing the panels were removed because they were corroded, by the looks of them.  The B-17 airplane was well-beyond my time, but I understand she was a great big bomber job, bigger than most of the ships I was used to back in the '20s and '30s.

"The ghostly 1929 Lockheed Vega image you see on the entry and home pages, XB-MAA, is of Mexican registry. It used to be U.S.-registered as NC898E. She's a graceful and pretty job, and I remember her landing a few times during the late 20's and early 30's. She oughta' be in a museum. Oh, well, maybe someday...

"Our webmaster tells me that this site is implemented in Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0, whatever that means."

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