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Help Paul C. -- Airship Pilot


Paul S
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Here is a picture I picked up from somewhere...if Paul C. wouldn't mind burning in his face, I think this will be an even more interesting portrait.

 

Paul S.

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Here is a picture I picked up from somewhere...if Paul C. wouldn't mind burning in his face, I think this will be an even more interesting portrait.

 

Paul S.

You picked that up from me. That is a studio photo of an airship pilot from my collection.

 

Patrick

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Here's the pic, and Wiley, I would love to see your wings. These are the most faked wing out there in my opinion!

 

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These are airship pilot wings, only 57 (?) pilot's actually qualified to wear them but LOTS of makers!! The "preferred" maker is BB&B

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Here's the pic, and Wiley, I would love to see your wings. These are the most faked wing out there in my opinion!

 

post-182-1225465107.jpg

 

These are airship pilot wings, only 57 (?) pilot's actually qualified to wear them but LOTS of makers!! The "preferred" maker is BB&B

 

Paul is correct, for a relatively rare rating, I airship wings were made by numerous companies, such as BB&B, NS Meyer, Kenney, Firmen, and Blackinton. I also think that either Link or AMCRAFT may have also made the wing pattern as well. Furthermore, a number of wings exist that don't seem to have a hallmark. Likely a few others that have escaped my mind right now.

 

I don't know if BB&B is the "preferred" maker, as any of the above mentioned wings would be highly sought after, but why quibble :lol:

 

I believe that one reason for the quantity of wings is that lighter than air transportation in the military was something that was maintained for many years. I think most of the USAAC airships were retired by the late 20's early 30's, but the USN maintained their fleet of airships well after WWII in one way or the other.

 

This wing is one of the AMCRAFT/W C Link attributed variations. Some people think it is Amcraft because of the hardware and snowflake back, but I have had other serious collectors argue that it is actually a Link-made wing. This came off of Ebay a few years ago.

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I will have to repost these pictures later tonight because they are worthy of some study. I have 3 photos, 2 portraits of this man, one in the 1920's (that started the thread) and likely one pre/during WWII. Then, I have a third snapshot of this man and about 4-5 other airship pilots taken in the 1920-1930 time period from around the Chicago area. About 2/3 of the pilots are named, but NOT my guy. ARGH. In the group picture, you can see that most of the pilots are wearing the metal wings, but at least one has on a nice bullion set of airship wings. As said before, this is a pretty rare photograph of one of likely less than 100 pilots rated to wear this wing.

 

Here is the later photo when he was a Major or Lt Col.

 

This was an ebay find. I was lucky and the pictures on the auction were really poor quality. One day, I hope to get his name.

 

Later, I will post much higher quality and upclose scans. I am pretty sure I have posted these photos on the WAF forum and here as well, but I can't recall.

 

Patrick

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Sorry to piggyback on this thread, but I would like to get your opinion on these wings. They were sold on Manion's a few weeks ago. Didn't have the funds to get them, but would like to know if they were real or not.

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Thanks Paul. What I actually had in mind was that this guy appears to have a shiner below his left eye...maybe following a little evening frolic the night before. Hence the dark original. When I lightened it with one of my programs, that dark area beneath his eye didn't go away.

 

While I have some attention on this subject, what do you folks think of this wing?

post-3515-1225483407.jpg

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Here's the pic, and Wiley, I would love to see your wings. These are the most faked wing out there in my opinion!

 

 

These are airship pilot wings, only 57 (?) pilot's actually qualified to wear them but LOTS of makers!! The "preferred" maker is BB&B

 

I'll get you a better picture when I get a chance to use a real camera instead of this stoopid phone!

The back has no markings so I suppose this is one of the ol' fakerooes!

 

 

post-1678-1225485920.jpgpost-1678-1225485491.jpg

 

Wiley

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Thanks Paul. What I actually had in mind was that this guy appears to have a shiner below his left eye...maybe following a little evening frolic the night before. Hence the dark original. When I lightened it with one of my programs, that dark area beneath his eye didn't go away.

 

While I have some attention on this subject, what do you folks think of this wing?

From the ASMIC website ( I wrote it, and I have one)

 

The Mystery of the Pasquali & Co. Sterling Airship Wings

I have been trying to track down the original of these wings for several years. The following is my theory:

This wing was purchased several years ago on eBay, It came out of the western part of the US. This was the first one I found on eBay , since then I have seen several more. At first they all came out of the west, now they are seen all over the US. A set of these also turned up in a 30 year old collection.

I have held 3 of these, and each one had a different pin. A collector friend who had access to a spectrometer (?) had a set analyzed and apparently the silver was of a type used in the 40's. The construction is correct, soldered posts and they are die struck. The wings are very heavy.

The first thing that jumps out is the spelling "Pasquali " of which I can find no reference NOT "Pasquale" which is a known wing maker. Also the wing I have has a very light weight pin, the wing from the older collection has a heavier pin, the third wing had different wing from the other two.

Finally, I was a set of these being sold by a seller who was selling the old stock of an shop from the "House of Swords". Apparently this store commissioned a lot of incredibly well made fakes of all types, lot of Nazi items and WWI wings. Though yet another collector, I discovered that apparently a family member has been selling this old stock on eBay through an intermediary.

I know that there is a lot conjecture here on my part, but the facts seem to add up. A collector buy one of these in the late 70's early 80's, nice pin. The owner of the House of Swords dies suddenly, and these wings disappear from the market. A family member starts "cleaning out the basement" and these wings resurface, possibly without pins. Pins are added with what ever is handy, and they start showing up on the market. Please feel free to drop me an email if you have any other info that either proves or disproves my theory!

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Hey Paul, could you say more about your statement, "A collector friend who had access to a spectrometer (?) had a set analyzed and apparently the silver was of a type used in the 40's." I am having a hard time understanding how silver would differ over the course of 60 years. Are you speaking of the alloy? If so, what are the differences? Do you know what kind of spectrometer was used?

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I suspect that Paul C's friend was using mass spectrometry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry ) which should be able to delineate the chemical composition of a sample of sterling silver. Most large universities or college chemistry/physics departments likely have one. The trick would be getting someone to run a sample for you.

 

As to the wing of Paul S, it seems kind of suspect that the last letter of Pasquale (or Pasquali) is crossed out.

 

To be honest, I think one has to be very very careful about airship wings. I believe that the NS Meyer wings were restruck from original dies and that over the years a number of "hallmarkless" wings or fantasy wings with added bogus hallmarks have been added to these NS Meyer-like restrikes over the years.

 

At this point, except for a very few patterns of wings, you kind of have to go with your guts and be prepared to have about an equal number of people say thumbdown.gif or thumbsup.gif. It has been my impression that those people who "know" typically decide on a thumbs up or down based on what THEY have in their collection. Here is a nice collection of wings ( http://www.ww2wings.com/wings/usaaf/usaafa...ipballoon.shtml ), but even here, I think some are suspect.

 

IMHO, the two hardest types of wings to tell from the fakes are the TO and airship wings.

 

Patrick

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I am not a chemist, but mass specs can tell you a great deal about a compound. You can measure both the common elements present and the trace, contaminating elements. Sterling is (IIRC) ~ .925% pure, with a mixture of other elements, such as copper, tin, brass, zinc, lead, etc. Some of these are intended to be present, others are likely contaminations that are found in the mix (for example, maybe "old" sterling has a high sulfur content compared to "newer" sterling silver alloys). As technology advances, you tend to get changes in mining, smelting, purifying and processing of the base metals that likely alter the composition and percentages that can be read by the mass spec. If you had items from different eras, you could potentially get some ideas of not only the age of the "sterling silver" composition by where it was made. The articles below mentions some of these ideas.

 

http://www.925-1000.com/silverhistory.html

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal...720302/abstract

 

As to if you can actually tell the differences of sterling silver made in the 1920's, 1940's or post-war, I have no idea, but would not be that surprised to find out that you could indeed to that as described. For example, I suspect that better smelting processes developed in the last 50 years removed much of the contaminations from silver ore as it was processed, and that comparing something made post WWII with something from the 1920's (that contains these trace contaminations) may indicate that fact, thereby indicating that when an item was made.

 

Patrick

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O.K., to my eye, this one is from the same obverse die as the "Pasquali" although the reverse is different. Marked BB&B, do the marks and die look like an original?

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Hey Patrick!

 

Yeah, MS is very sensitive. As a matter of fact, confirmatory drug tests (the ones that stand up in a court of law) are a combination of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.

 

I guess you would have to get a sample of the metal by dissolving it in nitric acid or some other kind of solvent.

 

You would have to be some sort of silver expert to know the differences in impurities over the course of a century.

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This is a copy of an N.S. Meyer catalog published in 1930. I found the catalog at the Library of Congress when I was doing some research, and I copied 4 pages for reference.

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O.K., so what do we think here? Do we have a c.1930 Meyer die that someone is taking liberties with, or do we have a Meyer die that Meyer used to make some wings for others as a subcontractor?

 

I understand from another collector that Meyer made none of its own wings, contracting with International Silver (if I recall correctly) most frequently to make many of its wings to Meyer specs.

 

The "Pasquali" wing I posted earlier is one of 3-4 I've had, each one identical in the use of drop in catches, somewhat lightweight pins for the heft of the wing...something I associate with earlier (1920s 1930s) wings, although not exclusively. Each of the "Pasquali" wings had chop marks through the mark which would indicate to me no particular intent to deceive, as would the misspelling also, except one which had no chop marks.

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Hi Paul,

 

to be honest, I think what we are seeing in some of these wings are the 3rd and 4th reiteration of NS Meyer restrike in many cases. I have noticed that is more common feature of some of these restrike wings is to add fantasy hallmarks. I have an example of this here on my website ( http://pfrost.bol.ucla.edu/05.html ) and the picture below.

 

The biggest problem is that in many cases, they seem to be using either the same dies or very similar dies and that this has the unfortunate effect of making the real and the restrikes almost impossible to tell apart. Adding insult to injury, I think only about 2-3 collectors right now actually have had the real experience of having been able to handle and compare many of these wings over a long time period (and I am not one of them). These fake wings were common when I started collecting almost 20 years ago. So, to be honest, most of us are only brandishing opinions and conjecture about these wings, and that is vastly different than "truth"and

"fact"

 

Patrick

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