Fairchild Club Forum

'all this talk about colors has me curious i noticed blue on the
inside of a wing strut fairing. is there any way anybody nose how to
track down the original color from fairchild on a particular airplane'

'I don't think there is a way to determine what color the airplane had
when it left the factory. According to Jamie Treat and others who
have put a lot more effort into their research than I, there are
simply no factory records that anyone has found that list the colors
the airplane had when it was new. I have a full set of logbooks and
ordered all the 337's and related paperwork in the FAA aircraft file
and haven't seen any documentation from the factory indicating
original colors. The best I could do was the logbook entries and
337's from the airplane's first recover, which list the colors as
yellow and green. This rebuild was also documented in a magazine
article with color pictures and in the pictures, the airplane is
indeed yellow and green. Also, when I stripped all the paint off the
sheet metal, it was yellow all the way down (must have been 30 coats
of yellow paint on that airplane!), although this is hardly
definitive because my airplane was originally built as a "W" and
converted to Ranger power in the 1950's, so the cowling isn't
original to the airplane, although the rest of the sheet metal is.

It's a shame to not be able to determine, with a high degree of
certainty, the original colors of a given airplane. However, the
lack of information does allow one a little bit of license in picking
finish colors.

Best Wishes,
Brad Donner
NC77605'