aeronautical engineer with Boeing in Seattle, is a principal source of detailed information on vintage aircraft in the United States, and has provided much of the data for a number of replicas of 1914-18 War aircraft now under construction or flying. He is currently engaged on a redesign of the Fokker D.VIII monoplane of 1918 in association with Herr Rheinhold Platz, the original designer, with a view to starting a replica building program. A full-scale Fokker Triplane replica of this period has been under construction by Mr. Bowers for nearly five years. At least six others are known to be under construction from plans that he has provided. Another aircraft built by Mr. Bowers is a full-scale replica of the Wright Model EX of 1911, the first aeroplane to cross the American continent. This machine was tested as a towed sailplane in the Autumn of 1961 and is to be powered by a converted "B" Ford automobile engine from a 1938 Funk monoplane. In addition to this work on replicas, Mr. Bowers has designed and built a single-seat light aircraft known as the Fly Baby... Bowers was the founding president of the EAA's Chapter 26, in the Seattle area. Aviation media career One of the principal U.S. aviation historians of the 20th Century, Bowers wrote or co-authored over 40 aviation books, and several hundred magazine and journal articles. His first articles, about his model airplane designs, appeared in Air Trails magazine in 1938. By the time his plans for his full-sized airplane, the Fly Baby, began appearing in the EAA magazine Sport Aviation, in 1963, he had already published his first books about aircraft. Bowers was an avid aviation photographer—particularly noted for photography of historic aircraft—accumulating over 25,000 negatives in his collection by 1962. The photos further supported his publications. The collection became known as one of the largest such collections in the nation, and is now in the archives of the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Bowers wrote a text on the subject, A Complete Guide to Aviation Photography (TAB Books, 1980), which was reprinted in several subsequent editions. In the 1960s, Bowers was among a small handful of writers chronicling U.S. military aviation. He served as a contributing editor for Sentry Publications' twin magazine titles Wings and Airpower, drawing on the lifetime of aviation photographs of his own, and of a vast archive collected through his employment at