| Vahe David Demirjian, e-mail, 22.08.2020 19:41 The Fletcher FBT-2 was a prototype trainer plane which first flew in 1941. It was offered to the US Army Air Force as a trainer, but failed to secure a production order. Fletcher Aviation, however, decided to modify the FBT-2 prototype into a drone control aircraft with tricycle landing gear as the CQ-1, which also formed the basis of the PQ-11 target drone (both the CQ-1 and PQ-11 had a Pratt & Whitney Wasp Junior engine). When production plans for the PQ-11 were cancelled, Fletcher used the CQ-1 and PQ-11 as the basis from a bomb-packed glider design, the BG-1, which had the engine removed and replaced by a warhead encasing. Ten BG-1s were built, the first of which flew in April 1942. However, the BG-1 was not put into operational service due to unsatisfactory flying qualities during flight tests. Fletcher had plans for an advanced bomb glider design, the BG-2, which had two BG-1 fuselages joined together by a center wing section, but the BG-2 was cancelled before it could be built (some older sources identify the BG-2 as a derivative of the Frankfort CG-1 transport glider, but this is refuted by official USAF record and the fact that the BG-2 design was completely different from the CG-1 design). reply |
| Roscoe, e-mail, 15.03.2011 23:09 Fletcher had a airstrip at rosemead, about 2 miles SW of the El Monte airport. I was a student at Pasadena City College(Aero Tech)under Max Harlow in 1954. A fellow student took me for a ride in a talorcraft out of Rosemead just before I went off to the USAF aviation cadets. PCC students would bring their Harlow like school built A /C down to rosemead and have more sucess than the Fletcher-built A /C. When I got back from cadets in 1956, Rosemead AP was no more. reply |
