Knights Without Parachutes — parks family

If you get the chance to visit the VAFM in person, your first priority should be to get a tour from Andy Parks; there's nobody else in the world with his knowledge of the people in the collection as well as personal experience of aviation and with building WWI replicas. But after that, talk to some of the mechanics and ask them how they build WWI airplanes with the materials, fuels, and regulations of a century later. 

Adventure in the Air Bigglesworth, popularly known as Biggles, a slight, fair-haired, good-looking lad still in his teens, but an acting Flight Commander, was talking, not of wine or women as novelists would have us believe, but of a new fusee spring for a Vickers gun which would speed it up another hundred rounds a minute. Boys may believe after reading Hardy Boys books that sons of detectives actually bring international criminals to justice during school vacations. Adults realize real adventure stories are few and far between, and hardly ever happen to the same person...except in a very few periods...

This shop really started several years ago, when we stumbled onto a little museum that was having a fly-in. We talked a bit to the friendly guy driving the shuttle bus from the parking area, and later were surprised to see him walking around in a WWI uniform. Eventually we figured out this was the director of the museum, Andy Parks. Somewhere after that we learned that it wasn't a replica WWI uniform he was wearing - this was the real thing! It was fun watching the colorful little WWI replica airplanes fly, and we got to look at them...