G-bbux & G-bbuy
Good evening Savoia,
We all love this thread and the memory jogging nostalgic pics that keep appearing ... now you show G-BBUX which I flew many times before selling. In the early 1970s, I was pretty active in sales having sold 300 aircraft or so while I was with Spooner Aviation. I purchased two B206s one week and registered them consecutively. G-BBUX and G-BBUY. I sold G-BBUX to a Mr Bill Gates of the Monks Group but taught him to fly on an Enstrom from his Hunstanton holiday home which you could do in those days. Most of the flying was done at Norwich Airport. Being a weighty fellah, he hated the piston and in short time, I took the Enstrom, G-BBBZ back for the new Bell. The price for a new Forth Worth B206 was £84,000 believe it or not. The Enstrom 28A just £23,000.
AMH were the Agusta Distributor in the 1970s, but I purchased the above two Fort Worth machines from the Bell distributor, CSE at Kidlington.
Now who do I remember at Fairoaks AMH. The old boss himself of course, who was always bringing back boxes of huge fresh salmon from his Scotland home. He was also a good model aircraft flyer. Alan Mann sponsored the Frank Gardner Lotus Cortina which I raced against around 1967/68. I never won though! There was a Dave Green in the maintenance division. Chief engineer was a Jock something, a nice rotund fellow who was an ace diagnostic engineer. I was talking to Gary Savage just a week or so ago. Gary would have been with the company in the 1970s as was Ken Davies the Bell 47 instructor whose party pice was to autorotate to the centre of the field, touch skids down only to lift off for a 180 degree turn still without power.
I'm pretty sure Alan Mann raced in his early days. All happy memories for me and hopefully others.
Bye for now. Dennis Kenyon.