I have some very fond, and, well, some tragic memories of the Kenhi Panther. I've always wanted one and am still on the lookout for a pristine kit, so I'm jealous David!
I do have a set of the plans that were drawn by professional draftsman from the original kit parts, however. Still, it is not as cool as having one of the actual original kits.
I did build the Midwest version of the Panther, which had a C-Tube wing instead of the one with the turbulator strips on the leading edge. Not really satisfying... Many of you know that the very first Classic Stunt event at the Vintage Stunt Championships in 1989 was won by Bob Whitely who flew a Kenhi Panther.
I'm pasting in here a very small snippet of an autobiography that I writing, and it deals with the bittersweet memory of the building of a Kenhi Panther by a childhood hero. That hero was "Big Ed" Mahler, a very famous airshow pilot, but the story I'm relating here happened several years before he became famous on the airshow stage. My father ran the Doylestown, PA airport,and also had a manufacturing facility there. Big Ed worked for dad as both a machinist and a pilot. The timeframe of this story was 1961. Here goes...
Dad was also charged with running the airport as its General Manager. One of the machinists who dad brought with him to Doylestown from Berkeley Heights was Eddie Mahler. Eddie was originally from Brooklyn, and was a member of the famed Brooklyn Skyscrapers Free Flight club. Eddie had won C Free Flight at the 1954 Nats, and was a very accomplished builder and flier. He was also an extremely skilled full-scale pilot who had flown cargo in and out of tiny fields in Central America a few years before coming to work for dad.
Eddie, who was a very tall man, came to be known simply as “Big Ed,” and he quickly became another hero to me. Big Ed owned an AT-6 Texan that he restored himself. It was absolutely gorgeous in every respect. He painted it white with orange trim, and it sort of reminded me of a Stunt model’s trim scheme. Amazingly, Big Ed was also a very talented CL Stunt pilot, and when he came to work at Doylestown, he boarded with our family, along with Red Reinhardt. Ed brought with him a white and orange Nobler that he had owned for some time. While he lived with us, Big Ed built a Kenhi Panther from a kit. Each evening I would sit and watch him work on that model, and I learned a great deal from him about construction. In fact, that was the first flapped stunt model that I watched go together!
I was always pestering Big Ed for a ride in his AT-6, and one day he surprised me by agreeing. Wow! A ride in a Texan! He sat me in the rear seat and attached all of the seatbelt and shoulder straps, but when he tried to pull them down tight, he ran out of adjustment. I was just too small for the man-sized straps. Instead of telling me to get out and canceling the ride, Big Ed just smirked and said “hold on tight” as he slid the canopy closed!
Big Ed was a natural pilot and a great showman. In fact, he went on to become a very famous air show pilot many years later. He taxied the Texan to the end of the 2,800-foot long runway and started the takeoff run. The Texan lifted into the air pretty quickly, but Big Ed didn’t even begin to allow it to climb. Instead he retracted the landing gear and let the big plane settle just a bit toward the runway! The prop couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet from the grass strip. I saw the end of the runway approaching and the power lines at the edge of the field getting ever closer. I remember looking up at them at the moment that Big Ed pulled the stick back hard. The Texan lunged straight up and I looked back over my shoulder to see the field quickly falling away. This was to be the start of my first aerobatic ride in a full-scale airplane. And, what a ride it was. Big Ed threw the book at me with snap rolls, slow rolls, loops, spins, Cuban Eights, and a stint of extended inverted flight during which time I was hanging from the seat against the loose belts. I held onto the bars on either side of the seat for all I was worth, and was very scared that if I let go I would fall right through the canopy and towards the ground!
I really loved the ride, and I think I surprised Eddie by being so enthusiastic afterwards. I think he was trying to scare me. I flew with Eddie in several types of aircraft, including a Stearman, which the airport owned and used to tow gliders aloft and also to tow advertising banners.
Eddie was tragically killed in 1974 while doing some promotional flying for a Long Island air show in his PJ-300 biplane. He died just shortly after Red had passed away. That was a most sad time in my life; I lost two larger than life heroes in a very short amount of time. I'll never forget Big Ed, and Red, and I'll never forget that Kenhi Panther...
Bob Hunt
Topic: Kenhi Panther (Read 1011 times)