Charlie and Steve Gay’s 1965 Bowers Fly Baby 608X has returned to Oshkosh for the first time since 1970.
The Fly Baby is a single-seat, folding-wing monoplane, originally designed in 1960 by Pete Bowers to compete in EAA’s design competition.
Charlie acquired the Fly Baby in 2004 from family friend Don Hoover. Don built the airplane in 1965 and flew it until 1980, putting more than 1,000 hours on it.
Not only did the Fly Baby make it to Oshkosh to celebrate 50 years, the Gays’ Piper Pacer also made a return from 1970. The Pacer flew to Oshkosh alongside the Fly Baby in 1970 and landed together at AirVenture.
Flying into Oshkosh this year was a special moment for Charlie and Steve, as they thought back to the first OSH arrival and many years of family history since then in both airplanes.
The Pacer has served three generations of aviation enthusiasts, with the most recent adventure being Charlie’s son, Christian, who on July 7 soloed in the Pacer.
With the Fly Baby being an old aircraft, the Gays were both anxious and excited to fly it into Oshkosh from Pennsylvania.
“This is the longest trip it’s been on since Oshkosh in 1970,” Steve said. “Anytime you fly an old airplane a long distance, you never know what you’re going to run into. We are just glad it made it here to Oshkosh, and I think Hoover would have been happy it made it, too.”
The Fly Baby is a unique plane to have here because the Gays decided to keep the plane looking almost exactly the way it did when it was here in 1970, resembling the way a homebuilt would look in the ’60s. In a side-by-side comparison of photos, you wouldn’t even know the difference unless you looked inside the plane; then you would notice a little piece of World War II history installed by Hoover.
“He (Don) was a B-26 pilot in WWII, and when he left France, he parked his B-26 and decided that he wanted to bring something along so he brought the altimeter,” Charlie said. “So the altimeter in the Fly Baby is the one out of his bomber in WWII.”