Airplane Pics

[rondog]

Maybe some day!!!!

You should research The Champlin Fighter Museum, which was an awesome private collection of WWI & WWII warbirds in Mesa, AZ. It's closed now, and I think the planes all went to a museum in Seattle. But some beautiful airplanes! I'm not sure how rare the FW-190D-12, with a V12 engine is, but they had one.

I've got to see these someday, because the man that built the collection, Doug Champlin, was from my hometown in Enid, OK. He was a multimillionaire, an heir of the Champlin Petroleum Co. When I was a teenager, I used to ride my Honda out to his hanger at the airport to drool over his Wildcat and Corsair, they let people come in freely. He also revived the manufacturing of Great Lakes high performance biplanes, don't know if those are still being made, but they were very cool, and I could roam the hangar where they were made. I actually remember the fuselage of that Focke-Wulf sitting outside on one side of the hangar, and someone telling me how rare it was because it was a V12 and not a radial.

Doug also founded Champlin Firearms, who builds high-end custom rifles and shotguns. They're still in business at the Enid airport. I also used to hang around the gun shop when I was 14-15, and they were all very good to me. Showed me every step they did to build 5-digit custom firearms, some incredible guns. Mostly big game safari rifles and awesome trap/skeet shotguns.

But that warbird collection, it's unreal.