And now it's been found in a 53-foot trailer in Saskatoon, SK.
Vancouver BC has, I think, the largest Chinatown in North America aside from San Francisco. I can only imagine how tiny the apartment must have been where they built this!
Story here.
A small, single-seat airplane — built by the hands of two teenaged brothers — touched Vancouver's clouds more than 80 years ago...
..."In the airplane world, it's an ultimate barn find," says Campbell Harrod, an airplane restorer from Dundas, Ont. who recently purchased the Pietenpol Sky Scout — long believed to be lost — with plans to someday return it to the sky.
The Pietenpol is significant because it was built by the Wong brothers, Robert and Tommy, using mail-order instructions in their Vancouver Chinatown apartment in 1935 and 1936. The brothers later established and ran Canada's largest flying school in Toronto, training more than 8,000 pilots and sending them into the sky...
...The Wong brothers built most of that airplane in their Chinatown apartment, with help from family. Their mother worked with friends to sew the wood-frame fabric.
Evelyn Wong, who currently lives in Singapore, got emotional recently when talking about what it was like to see that same fabric, exposed to the air after all these years, in a freshly-taken photograph...
"I'm feeling overwhelmed right now," she added, "just to know that it was our grandmother (who helped to sew the fabric). We never thought of our grandmother as a young person. We never thought of our dad and uncle as teenagers."
But teens they were — Robert 17 when the plane was ready to fly, and Tommy 14...
Vancouver BC has, I think, the largest Chinatown in North America aside from San Francisco. I can only imagine how tiny the apartment must have been where they built this!
Story here.
A small, single-seat airplane — built by the hands of two teenaged brothers — touched Vancouver's clouds more than 80 years ago...
..."In the airplane world, it's an ultimate barn find," says Campbell Harrod, an airplane restorer from Dundas, Ont. who recently purchased the Pietenpol Sky Scout — long believed to be lost — with plans to someday return it to the sky.
The Pietenpol is significant because it was built by the Wong brothers, Robert and Tommy, using mail-order instructions in their Vancouver Chinatown apartment in 1935 and 1936. The brothers later established and ran Canada's largest flying school in Toronto, training more than 8,000 pilots and sending them into the sky...
...The Wong brothers built most of that airplane in their Chinatown apartment, with help from family. Their mother worked with friends to sew the wood-frame fabric.
Evelyn Wong, who currently lives in Singapore, got emotional recently when talking about what it was like to see that same fabric, exposed to the air after all these years, in a freshly-taken photograph...
"I'm feeling overwhelmed right now," she added, "just to know that it was our grandmother (who helped to sew the fabric). We never thought of our grandmother as a young person. We never thought of our dad and uncle as teenagers."
But teens they were — Robert 17 when the plane was ready to fly, and Tommy 14...
