Flightplan

When we asked Wayne Pogue to put our club logo on the back of the new "Club T-Shirts" he informed us that the graphic, when blown up to "shirt size", was very poor.

You can see the old logo in the image at left and, yes, Wayne is right!   Primarily, that is because it was a "... nth generation" copy.

Back when the club decided to put up a new website, I asked a lot of folks if they had a file (disc) with the original artwork for the club logo.

No one came forward as having a copy so I found an old newsletter that I had and used Microsoft's "Paint" program to create a BMP file for the web. I knew it wasn't going to be very good because I can't draw!

Whereas the old logo is small (450 pixels wide) and crude, the new logo shown at the left is sharp, clear and was created much larger (1075 pixels wide) so it would look good when enlarged. Both of these images are "clickable" so you can see the difference.

Since the central image in the Flight Masters logo has always been a WWII era F-4 Corsair, (can anyone enlighten me as to why that particular airplane was chosen?) we set out on a search to locate a photograph of a Corsair that would be suitable to put into our logo. The criteria was demanding. It had to be Blue... It had to be shown flying in a slight "banking" attitude... The photo had to be of high enough resolution so that it would be "sharp and clear" when blown up... And above everything else, it had to be free! I believe I must have looked at "thousands" of Corsair photographs. Most were great photos ... just not suitable for our purposes.

Finally, I found the "perfect" image ... and it was not a photgraph!  It was an oil painting by artist Lou Drendel entitled, "Corsair victorious over a Zero". It was everything for which we had hoped, except it was copyrighted! The original is a 30" x 24" oil on canvas panel depicting the end of an air battle. The painting can be purchased for $250.00 from his website.

As you can tell from this painting, Mr. Drendel is a very good aircraft artist and I strongly suggest you check out his website at www.aviation-art.net. I contacted Mr. Drendel and asked permission to use the image (sent him the completed logo to view) and he granted the permission as long as we credit him as the artist.  Believe me when I say that is very kind of him!

I took everything that didn't look like a Corsair out of the original painting, changed the number on the Corsair's side to be the same as our AMA Club Charter Number, flattened out the dive and put it over our "two states" background. Brad was responsible for the background colors used and I think he came up with the perfect colors. I really like the new logo and hope you do too.