Artist: Tron Bykle
This painting is the front cover illustration for the book
"AN AIRMAN'S ODYSSEY: Walt Braznell and the Pilots He Led into the Jet Age"
William Braznell, Author
(Walt Braznell was a Robertson CAM-2 airmail pilot in 1928.)
My thoughts about this picture...
In addition to a beautiful cover painting by Tron
Bykle, this book contains a lot of first-hand history of the early days of
commercial aviation. It starts with some great stories of the Robertson
Aircraft operations all the way back to 1924-25. Walt Braznell was a
St. Louis teenager who became the Lambert Field airport boy. His heros
at the field were young pilots like Slim Lindbergh and Phil Love. Walt
Braznell learned to fly at Lambert Field, soloing a condemned National Guard
Jenny in the spring of 1926 at the age of eighteen. He witnessed the
beginning of CAM-2 air mail operations and was eventually hired in 1928 by
Bud Gurney as a CAM-2 mail pilot. Braznell went on to a distiquished
40 year career in the airline industry, retiring in 1968 as American Airlines'
Vice-President of Flight.
Artist Tron Bykle's painting of a Robertson DH-4 is pretty accurate, with only a few points of discussion.
The radiator frame and bottom cowling should be silver, not black.
This painting shows the wing and landing gear struts as silver. While I'm not convinced what color the struts actually were, I think it's obvious in all the b&w photos that the struts were not silver, but a much darker color, perhaps red like the fuselage. Close study of the b&w photos shows hardly any difference in the shades of gray between the struts and the red fuselage.
Like two of the other artists, Tron Bykle has put landing lights on his CAM-2 DH-4. He shows them on the top of the bottom wing. Note that Bob Benjamin has them on the bottom of the bottom wing, while Ray Crane has them on the bottom of the top wing. I believe Tron Bykle based his landing light location on this photo of a later Robertson DH-4 mail plane that appeared in Lindbergh's book "THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS".
