Do you know how hard it is to find an historical photo of the top wing surface of a 1948 C-170? Lately I’ve been doing some rummaging around Wichita State University’s digital archives. I would love to spend a week there studying the 33 linear feet of documents they have in their Duane Wallace Collection. It’s indexed online but not scanned. For example,
Box 14, Folder 23 is described as “Reports/Specifications: Model 170, misc.” Box 33 apparently has a “film of 170 rocket launches.” I presume in preparation/development of the L-19. Box 15, folder 7 makes mention of “twin 195”. Anybody heard of that project before?
Kansas Aviation Museum has another motherlode of documents and photos that I wish we could scan and archive in our Mx Library. Many of the photos in EAA’s March/April 2023 edition of
Vintage Airplane commemorating the 75th anniversary of the C-170 come from Bob Pickett’s collection at the Kansas Aviation Museum. They also have some 170 production cards from the Cessna factory. In an email from Ed Phillips, author of
Cessna: A Master’s Expression, he writes, “You may be shocked to learn that in the 1960s-1970s the Cessna company threw away tons of historical records that Bob Pickett retrieved by “dumpster-diving” many times before the trash trucks arrived!!! Without his efforts we would know a lot less about Cessna history. KAM is tasked with preserving his collection.“