Saunders
Aircraft Mid-January 2019 Research Report
Thank-you all for replying to my emails, my questions and phone calls on
Saunders Aircraft, I hope I’m not a bother to you, I like to think of you as
part of my Saunders research team.
My goal is to tell the Saunders Aircraft story, why?
We have a rc model airplane airfield adjacent to the airport at Gimli,
it’s mecca for us that fly rc airplanes. We excitedly bring our RV’s, full of
rc airplanes out to this model field and we stay for a weekend or longer. Playing
and flying our toy airplanes and telling airplane stories around the campfire
at night, it’s a magical time, I’m a kid
again!
Being a native Manitoban and with a passion for aviation how could I not
know about Saunders Aircraft.
I confess that I was at the Gimli airport in the summer 1975 as a Red
River College summer student working the Manitoba Dept. of Public Works doing
survey work on parking lots, and I’ll admit I was more interested in the Harvard
aircraft parked on the north side of Hangar 1 than learning about Saunders. I
continued in the civil - geotechnical
field and did not work in the aviation industry.
I’m now retired, I do occasional part time work for a geotechnical
engineering company here in Winnipeg and thus I have time to do aviation
research when not building rc airplanes.
In 2012 a rc model airplane club mate, Wilf, who worked at Saunders
Aircraft decided to build a rc model of the ST-28, and I volunteered to do some
Saunders research and roughly sketch up a draft set of plans for a ~93” wingspan
model and the seed was planted for me on the Saunders story.
From 2012 to 2018, whenever I found Saunders information on the internet
I would save it. When it was too windy to fly our rc airplanes at Gimli field,
we would tour the Gimli airport and visit the ST-28 airframe and static test airframe.
It’s sad to say that the ST-28 airframe was scrapped by the WCAM museum a
couple of years ago.
Where are we now:
A blog site newly set up for only for
Saunders Aircraft - https://saundersaircraft.blogspot.com/ the posts are not in chronological order, we
share the information as it comes in.
A Saunders Aircraft Facebook Group
page at ` https://www.facebook.com/groups/2763480640542919/?ref=bookmarks
Thank-you again for sharing your information, if you see I have used
your information in-correctly, let me know and I’ll fix it and I repeat that my
intention is tell a Saunders Aircraft story with no bias, no criticism, no axe
to grind, just to get a good Saunders Aircraft story out on the web for future
generations.
Sincerely,
Ken Kalynuk
Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada
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