#gpfaf

And now for something very special...!

The aviation art of Dave Black on deviantART caught my eye and to my pleasant surprise, Dave agreed to create a custom work to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Eric Clutton's first flight in FRED.  Above you see the results, two early concept sketches and the final drawing inspired by a photo of Eric flying FRED in Tullahoma in summer 2012.  Printing out these wonderful sketches and posting them above the workbench should provide endless motivation for any FRED builder.

Thanks very much, Dave!

Thanks to Mike Perkins for sharing nearly an hour of footage of his FRED G-PFAF and to Pete Moore for helping get it off the original tapes and into a format I could use, I can now share my first of what I hope will be several original FRED videos.  This is also the inaugural clip on the new cluttonfred YouTube channel.  Enjoy!

Looking ahead, despite challenges including a major earthquake, Evan Belworthy down in New Zealand is working on some video footage of FRED ZK-FRD that I hope to share soon.

The folks at the Sport Aviation Association of Australia (SAAA) were kind enough to feature this site in the April/May 2010 issue of their magazine Airsport.  The idea was to help me get in touch with some Australian FRED builders and owners.  Unfortunately, no Aussie FREDs have yet come to light, but I did get an e-mail from an Aussie telling me about another UK FRED.

The G-INFO entry on G-PFAF tells us that FRED Series 2 G-PFAF was built in 1999 by “FERN K AND PERKINS MS” and is owned by Mr. Michael Stephen Perkins, presumably one of the builders.  That’s all I know and I haven’t been able to get in touch with Mr. Perkins.

The photo of G-PFAF above and a few more in the FRED worldwide photo gallery (see "Pics" above) were kindly supplied by Jo Hunter of the aviation photo web site futurshox.net.  Can anyone tell us more about G-PFAF?