Aero Vintage Books

I was looking through the appendices of Dan Hagedorn's B-18 and B-23 book and noticed this entry:

"...Ed Wlodyka was sent as a USAF recruit to J&J Air Tech, a private school located in Sarasota, Florida, in 1951, where he was to be trained as and Airframe & Engine (A&E) Aircraft Mechanic, he was surprised to find, parked next to the school's hangar, a B-18B. It was used by the school on practically a daily basis to make the trainees familiar with starting, running, and checking out engine performance. The school also had a Lockheed P-38 Lightning and a Boeing TB-17."

Anyone ever seen a photo? I didn't find anything in a Google search and nothing on Newspapers.com.

Any ideas which B-17 this was?

Thanks,
Nick

Figured take a run at this from another angle -- looked-up surviving B-18's and P-38's to see if any of them was hanging out at J & J AIR CRAFT SERVICES, and while there a couple of possible candidates, nothing specifically links the survivors to this school.

one possible photo did appear - but nothing on these aircraft

https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/281345

Dave,
Great lead and glad to see J&J was an actual place! More digging to do...
Nick

I looked up the city directories and found that the owners were Edward T. Denham Jr and Fred O. Joyner.

It looks like they were in operation crom about 1947 to circa 1960. Though Mr Joyner appears to have moved on by the mid 50s. I checked both their obituaries and there is no mention of them.

The paper is not indexed on Newspapers.com, but is on Ancestry. i found nothing of interest in the newspapers, which was surprising. i may give it another go.

I also looked at some aerial photographs from 1948 and 1964 with no positive results.

Mr Denham was a pilot instructor and so was Mrs Joyner. I don't know if you can do a name search on FAA records but it may be worthwhile to see what it was they were operating as a live flyer. And just to stop the inevitable...live flyer vs dead flyer ( aka instructional airframe!).

Oh, and I still have to log on three times, most days before it lets me on.

Oh, and I did do a search using "b-18" as my subject. Unfortunately there was an incident with four B-18s before the war that really crowds out your search results.

Google has really gone down hill as a search engine. I use to put in a search term and get back half a billion hits and now sometimes I get a dozen pages. The really frustrating thing is that I have websites bookmarked that are still active, but when I google the original search term they do NOT show up on my results page.

I do medieval English research, most in the time of the three Edwards and there is particular Court official I have researched who used to come up on thousands of individual webpages with a google search. Now I get perhaps 12 pages that are mostly redundent. Though the bookmarked pages show that the other pages not indexed anymore by google are indeed still up and running. Why a program that uses up half a gig of memory gives me less support than when it was a couple of megs is beyond me. IF anyone can recommend a good search engine let me know!