FARMINGDALE. L.I., N.Y, Aug 14 — W. C. “Wes” Holmes, chief pilot and assistant sales manager for E. W. Wiggins Airways, Inc., of Norwood. Mass., today took delivery from Republic Aviation Corporation on the first of the Wiggins organization’s four place, all-metal Seabee amphibians to be delivered In the New England area Wiggins are Seabee distributors for Massachusetts, Rhode Island and parts of southern Vermont and with their eight dealers throughout this territory, have 120 of the new “family-size” land-and-water planes on order.
“At this stage of private flying,” Holmes said, “in the New England area, the Seabees arc in about equal demand as between the private or so-called sportsman pilots and the base operators who will use them for charter work. Among our first Seabee buyers there have been a lot of people who are buying them because they are so ideal to get from their townhomes to their summer homes, or to their favorite hunting and fishing grounds. But then there are a lot of others who expect to make a business of flying professional and business men and their families, who do not own a plane, to the many islands and coastal points around the Cape, and for that matter all along the Atlantic coast and Long Island sound.
“Our entire New England seacoast is ideal for this kind of operation,” Holmes said, “and the Seabee is the ideal airplane for the job. Then we have some business firms which have bought Seabees principally for business travel. Among these are some owners of fishing floats who are going to use the Seabees to supervise their fishing operations. They will keep in direct contact with the boats, flying from one to another, talking with them by radio or landing alongside them if necessary, and keeping a much closer check than has over before been possible.”
Holmes, who started flying In 1933, has been with the Wiggins aviation enterprises since 1937, except for 38 months of aviation duty with the U. S. Navy during the war, from which he emerged with the rank of lieutenant commander. He considers himself as “strictly a New England pilot” except for his naval flying, which gave him a chance to compare the many advantages of amphibian planes in the New England coastal and lake regions with those in the Minnesota-Wisconsin lake region of the Upper
Mississippi Valley, while he was stationed at the Naval Aviation Training Center at Minneapolis, Minn.
Asked how he happened to take up flying as a business. Holmes replied: “Well, I became a pilot because I’d always wanted to fly. Having learned to fly, I know I would never be happy in anything but the aviation business.”