I have previously posted about Beaver ZK-AVL and its interesting but ultimately tragic history, and you can see that post HERE. In that post I included photos of ZK-AVL in a Stearman red colour scheme with James Aviation and then in a mainly white scheme with Aerial Farming (NZ) Ltd. I thought we had covered its history pretty well but a video recently posted by Graeme Mills of Kiwi Beavers shows ZK-AVL in a different scheme:
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I took these screen shots from the video and it looks like it has the red and black stripes of James Aviation. As ZK-AVL was only owned by Aerial Farming for 5 months before it crashed this must have been in 1959, and obviously before it was painted white by them. So I assume that it was also operated in these colours by James Aviation. Any thoughts?
Dave Paull has a memory stick with that video and others taken by my father, Ted Stratton, with an 8mm movie camera.
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Graeme Stratton
AVL is in the standard James colours of the late '50s,all the Fletchers were in the same buff silver overall/black and red stripe scheme.I imagine James sold the Beavers for economic reasons,as late 1950's the economy was in poor shape and James in that time was still a small company,They were also trying to sell the DC-3 around that time and the Fletcher assembly had dried up,I think only a couple of new Fletchers were sold in the last couple of years of the 1950's,and they were assembled ones sitting around.James also had committed to the purchase of a block of Fletchers,so I suspect it made sense to sell the Beavers to raise some cash.
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