Peter M. Bowers was a journalist specializing in the field of aviation

Aviation

Aviation is the design, development, production, operation, and use of aircraft, especially heavier-than-air aircraft. Aviation is derived from avis, the Latin word for bird.-History:...

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Bowers is famed in the general aviation

General aviation

General aviation is one of the two categories of civil aviation. It refers to all flights other than military and scheduled airline and regular cargo flights, both private and commercial. General aviation flights range from gliders and powered parachutes to large, non-scheduled cargo jet flights...

 community for his work with General Aviation News. Writing 26 books and over 800 articles detailing historic aircraft

Aircraft

An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. An aircraft counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.Although...

 for a column called "Of Wings and Things", Bowers was a fixture of the newspaper for decades. Also an engineer at Boeing

Boeing

The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...

, he was an avid aviation photographer and also designed homebuilt

Homebuilt

The term homebuilt is used to describe machines built outside of specialised workshops or factories. It can mean different things such as kit cars or homebuilt computers, but normally it pertains to homebuilt aircraft, also known as amateur-built aircraft or kit planes. Homebuilt aircraft or kit...

 aircraft such as the Fly Baby

Bowers Fly Baby

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 and Namu II

Bowers Namu II

|-References:* "Pete Bowers" Wind in the Wires Vol XIV No 10* -See also:...

. Bowers also completed and flew a Detroit G1 Gull

Detroit G1 Gull

|-See also:...

 primary glider

Primary glider

Primary gliders are a category of aircraft that enjoyed worldwide popularity during the 1920s and 1930s as people strove for simple and inexpensive ways to learn to fly....

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Bowers lived in Seattle for most of his life. He served as a contributing editor for Sentry Publications' twin magazine titles Wings and Airpower, drawing on a lifetime of aviation photographs of his own, and of a vast archive collected through his employment at Boeing

Boeing

The Boeing Company is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois since 2001...

. Bowers died from cancer in 2003.

Under its Fly Baby entry Jane's All The World's Aircraft

Jane's Information Group

Jane's Information Group is a publishing company specializing in transportation and military topics.-History:It was founded by Fred T...

, 1964–1965, says of Bowers:

Mr. Peter Bowers, an 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.VII

Fokker D.VII

The Fokker D.VII was a German World War I fighter aircraft designed by Reinhold Platz of the Fokker-Flugzeugwerke. Germany produced around 3,300 D.VII aircraft in the summer and autumn of 1918. In service, the D.VII quickly proved itself to be a formidable aircraft...

 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

Fokker Dr.I

The Fokker Dr.I Dreidecker was a World War I fighter aircraft built by Fokker-Flugzeugwerke. The Dr.I saw widespread service in the spring of 1918...

 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

Wright brothers

The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur , were two Americans credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, on December 17, 1903...

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...