Recently I have been haunting the Provincial Archives New Brunswick here is Fredericton. I came across some crash images of CF-KCG, Conair #615, which I have posted to its aircraft page.

Also, a mystery has been solved! FZTR and FZTS: The Mystery page, which now reads SOLVED! Barry McLeod had alerted me to a very interesting page run by the Stoltzfus family of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, who had purchased four Avengers in 1957. After a series of emails regarding N7028C and N4173A, Ken Stoltzfus decided to order the Certificate of Registration for N4173A. The previously unknown BuNo was finally revealed as 85904 and the BuBo for N7028C was confirmed as 53775.

Read about it on the revised mystery page.

Please check out the new page on the Pacific Northwest, the mountain states that provided Avengers to the New Brunswick spray program. These companies were also active in spray programs in their own region. Feedback and corrections are encouraged, but please note that my poor attempt just scratches the surface. It should be considered as only a summary, i.e., until someone else writes the book on the period.

Winter is Coming, and I have started a period of new revisions on this TBM Avenger Archive. The Pilots page has been updated with new images and material with help from various Comments, the FPL files and the Forest Protection Limited Alumni Facebook site. More tweakings will occur over the next few days, so stay tuned. To come are a desperately needed rewriting of the US companies that provided aircraft and a second look at the individual Avenger histories, helped by the additions of some new images collected from the TBMs – Military and Civil Facebook site.

I’ve just updated Don Henry’s 2008 list of TBM pilots and the years they flew for aerial pest control and for firebombing, up to 2010. This is still a work on progress, so stay tuned. I’ve added some images as well.

Still to come are updates to U.S. companies.

I’ve just revised the Other Canadian air spray companies page. This includes Several New Brunswick companies (Miramichi, Maritime, JD Irving) and two from Ontario: Norfolk and Hicks and Lawrence. I’m going to tackle the U.S. companies next — wish me luck!

Besides Skyway and Conair, the other great pair of Canadian companies was Wheeler Airlines, which morphed into Wheeler-Northland and then Evergreen. I have separated this group from the Other Canadian Companies page and updated its content. Let me know what you think. Again, this is still a work in progress and represents what I know at the moment.