A Whale of a Tale

They name airplanes after many things—birds, especially; fish, occasionally; and even people, like Billy Mitchell or Ernest Shackleton. The names usually intend to reflect some sort of desired feature: swift flying, savage ferocity, or admirable tenacity.

Sea mammals usually get short shrift. There have been Dolphins and Walruses. But the truly magnificent cetaceans, the whales, don’t get much mention in Jane’s. Airbus might think its team is breaking ground with the Beluga transport, but an American homebuilder beat them by about 40 years.

However, it should be noted: Naming his new homebuilt after a famous killer whale wasn’t designer Peter M. Bowers’ idea. His first full-scale design, the single-seat Fly Baby, had won the 1962 EAA design contest, and hundreds of plans sets were sold. But Pete was pelted with the question: “What about a two-seater?”

He wasn’t enamored of attempts to add a second seat to the Fly Baby. Soon, though, a two-seater was under construction in Bowers’ shop. Compared to the Fly Baby, the new airplane was massive. Other homebuilders were astonished by the hulking aircraft taking shape. “It looks like a whale,” they said. The Seattle Aquarium had an orca (killer whale) and his friends decreed that the new airplane should be named after it: Namu II.

It is big—in three-point attitude, the prop hub is above my head, and I’m 6 feet tall. Part of that was probably due to the inverted gull wings (like a Corsair). It let him shorten the landing gear legs, which featured oleo struts rather than the rigid Fly Baby gear. It didn’t have folding wings, but the outer panels could be removed for storage or transport.

He designed the cockpit for two occupants, side-by-side. The legend is that Pete’s wife wanted a two-seater, but warned she didn’t want to be touching the pilot. I don’t know if that’s true, but if so, she must have been petite. I sat in the prototype once; it felt like a wooden Cessna 150. Pete was pretty skinny, though. Pete’s airplane had the N-number N75PA; the “PA” stood for “Pete and Alice” (his wife’s name).

The airplane displays obvious Bowers design legacy in the shaping of its tail and the use of wood for the primary structure. Like many homebuilders of the era, Pete had a war-surplus Lycoming O-290G ground power unit stashed in a corner of his shop. The 125-hp engine would be ideal for a two-seater.

Performance was what one would expect with a huge airplane with only 125 hp. But one reviewer found the airplane to fly very well, with excellent ground handling and very docile in-flight manners.

Bowers wrote dozens of articles about the Fly Baby, but none on Namu II. It was kind of out of character for him; perhaps he realized that his big two-seater really couldn’t compete with homebuilts like the Emeraude or the Jodel. Or it may have just indicated dissatisfaction with the final aircraft. He didn’t fly it for long; within a few years, it was tucked, inactive, into a local hangar.

How many were built? Only the prototype remains on the active FAA rolls, while a second one is listed as deregistered. There are plenty of Seattle-area legends about Namu II. One says the second Namu was built based on drawings fished from Bowers’ wastebasket. Another says that a third Namu was actually painted like a killer whale. I have found no proof of that, but that doesn’t inhibit artistic license …

What happened to the Namus? The second one had been stored in a hangar, and persons unknown broke in and stole the engine and propeller. It just faded to dust after that.

The original prototype had a kinder fate. In 2011, Mike Madrid of Lompoc, California, bought N75PA and restored it to flying condition. He describes it as “very pleasant to fly.”

So if you see this odd behemoth in the skies, raise your glasses to Pete Bowers’ magnificent white (and orange) whale.