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July 19, 2008 Hello Tom, Grundy here, Regarding your CNAC page on me, I wasn't aware it even existed until you mentioned it and I pulled it up for a look. It certainly needs a redo (and here is the beginning of that redo, thanks to this information from Grundy). I will put together a small package of background, CNAC and other aviation career history, a few related papers and photos and mail it to you, as soon as I can get to it. That may help you put together a better page. Meanwhile, I comment; I worked for PAA and PAA Africa Ltd....after time out for military service during WW II in the U.S. Army Air Corps / Air Force as engineering officer / air crew member.... I returned to PAA HQ in the Chrysler building NYC to help with their project of converting surplus military C-54 transports to civil DC-4 airliners for affiliate CNAC's postwar fleet and to prepare a special "Air Force One" DC-4 for the president of china. Later, I was manager of that CNAC conversion project at Glenn Martin plant at Baltimore while also assisting PAA's program evaluating Martin's 202 vv Convair's 240 postwar airliners for PAA's anticipated domestic operations. Upon completion of the CNAC /presidential plane conversions and their delivery to china, PAA sent me to CNAC (Shanghai). Captain Len Parish was a great friend who gave me aerobatic flying lessons in CNAC's AT-6 primary trainers at shanghai, flew my personal Stinson (just out of major work and untested) from Shanghai to Hong Kong during the Shanghai evacuation (while I was busy with evacuating CNAC property) and later checked me out in it at Kai Tak, and in a critical Hong Kong housing situation, generously offered my wife and me our choice of a couple of housing accommodations he had had the foresight to reserve. His demise in the Cathay Pacific airliner shoot-down by the reds was a tragedy deeply felt. Secondly, rather than a mechanic, I was chief engineer of CNAC until the defection in Hong Kong in 1949 and CNAC's subsequent dissolution. (at the urging of the new red masters. And with approval of the U. S. Govt., I continued as chief engineer of the new red airline for sometime, until accepting an offer from General Chennault to join CAT as chief engineer. It's a long story after that and I will offer you more on it in the promised supplemental material. I am nearly 93 now and just returned home after trike flying lessons at Jasper, TN. Learning to transition from some eighty years flying and association with conventional three axis aircraft to the 180 degrees opposite control movements of the weight shift trike.  or would like to be added to the CNAC e-mail distribution list, please let the CNAC Web Editor, Tom Moore, know. Thanks! |